Editor: Zen, PANews

From Polkadot to Polygon, the entrepreneurial path of industry veteran Charlie Hu spans nearly a decade of key cycles in blockchain infrastructure development. As an early participant in the Polkadot ecosystem and a pioneer in the Asia-Pacific region for Polygon, he has not only accumulated profound technical and ecological experience but also keenly captured the explosive opportunity in the Bitcoin ecosystem in 2023. Based on a deep understanding and engineering practice of BitVM technology, he co-founded Bitlayer with tech geek Kevin He, a Layer2 solution aimed at achieving scalability and programmability for Bitcoin, intending to become the true "computational layer" of the Bitcoin network.

Since the mainnet launch in the first quarter of 2024, Bitlayer has rapidly grown to become a leader in the Bitcoin Layer2 space: on-chain transaction volume has surpassed 71 million, with a peak TVL of nearly $900 million, frequently ranking first in the DefiLlama Bitcoin L2 leaderboard. Its core innovation, a decentralized cross-chain bridge and Rollup architecture built on BitVM, achieves secure and efficient asset cross-chain transfers and smart contract execution without relying on upgrades to the Bitcoin mainnet. Behind this is a senior engineering team with backgrounds from Polygon, Huobi Public Chain, Alibaba Super Chain, and Celestia, possessing strong execution capabilities and experience in both Eastern and Western markets.

Today (August 27), the Bitcoin-native Layer2 network Bitlayer officially launched its governance token BTR's Token Generation Event (TGE), marking the project's entry into a new phase of public engagement and ecological expansion. The official announcement indicates that the launch and trading arrangements for BTR have entered the operational phase, collaborating with multiple platforms for sales and trading support.

In recent months, Bitlayer has been very active: in the newly released Bitlayer 2.0 white paper, it redefined the Bitcoin Layer2 infrastructure and launched the first mainnet Beta of a cross-chain bridge based on the BitVM paradigm. Additionally, Bitlayer has established strategic partnerships with three major Bitcoin mining pools—Antpool, F2Pool, and SpiderPool.

Facing a new cycle dominated by institutional funds, Bitlayer has clearly positioned itself as "institutional-grade Bitcoin financial infrastructure." Bitlayer has also received funding support from international institutions, accumulating $25 million in financing, with supporters including Polychain Capital, Franklin Templeton, ABCDE, StarkWare, OKX Ventures, Alliance DAO, and UTXO Management, providing support for its technology development and ecological promotion.

In this bull market driven by Wall Street, Bitlayer has set a grand vision, attempting to become a key bridge connecting Bitcoin's native assets with the traditional financial world. How will this goal be achieved? PANews recently interviewed Bitlayer co-founder Charlie Hu, and here are the interview contents:

A Decade of Industry Veteran's Entrepreneurial Journey: From Polkadot and Polygon to Bitlayer

PANews: What experiences did you have before founding Bitlayer?

Charlie: During my early years studying for a master's degree in finance in the Netherlands, I was always in touch with the tech field and had a good understanding of early accelerators, tech innovation, especially the Internet of Things. My formal introduction to Bitcoin was a turning point— in 2013, at a Bitcoin Meetup in Amsterdam, I learned about Bitcoin and mining from the community and officially began studying the Bitcoin white paper. However, at that time, I did not consider blockchain as a focus for career development or include it in my career planning.

In 2015, I attended Ethereum's Devcon in Berlin and learned about Ethereum. I was very interested in what Gavin Wood was doing, as he led the development of Polkadot. I volunteered extensively with the Polkadot team and participated in the first round of investment in the project through a German friend.

Polkadot was the first major project I participated in after officially entering the industry. Between 2017 and 2019, I was responsible for simultaneous interpretation and translation at many domestic evangelism events and several Polkadot ecosystem tours in China. Additionally, I co-founded a Polkadot ecosystem brand called "Polkadot Base." Based on these experiences, I accumulated a lot of knowledge about Polkadot and the overall Web3 ecosystem construction. At the same time, I gradually discovered some issues within the Polkadot ecosystem, such as the high costs of slot auctions. Therefore, my attention shifted back to Ethereum.

In 2021, I joined Polygon as their official representative for China, later becoming the head of the Asia-Pacific region, responsible for project connections and developer relations. I also handled business development and major client collaborations, negotiating partnerships with companies like NetEase, Roblox China, and Tencent. Later, as the project team gradually shifted its focus to the U.S. and due to domestic policy and compliance issues, I left China and Polygon.

PANews: What prompted you to establish Bitlayer?

Charlie: At the beginning of 2023, concepts like inscriptions and BRC-20 became extremely popular, and I was among the earliest participants, earning some Bitcoin from it. I also observed issues within the Bitcoin network: significant congestion and high transaction fees, which made me realize this was not a sustainable future.

Many people, including myself, believed that the widespread development of the Bitcoin ecosystem was inevitable, but to attract institutional participation on a large scale, DeFi applications needed to be developed. However, these could not be realized on the Bitcoin mainnet, so I began researching various solutions to scale Bitcoin.

Later, in October 2023, we saw the BitVM white paper, which proposed a solution that could provide certain scalability and verifiability based on Bitcoin's existing scripting language without requiring hard forks, soft forks, or upgrades to the Bitcoin mainnet. I found it very interesting and began to delve deeper into it with Kevin He.

At that time, BTCFi projects like Merlin and Babylon were very popular, and we saw this as an opportunity, so we went all in on the Bitcoin Layer2 space and officially established Bitlayer. Based on the vision of becoming Bitcoin's "computational layer" and programmable infrastructure, we launched two core products: BitVM Bridge and Bitcoin Layer2 Rollup.

Current Status of Bitlayer's Ecosystem and Team

PANews: How is the development of the Bitlayer ecosystem now, and what key data can you disclose?

Charlie: Since launching Bitlayer at the end of 2023, nearly 20 months have passed, during which we have experienced a lot.

Our first round of financing was relatively early, with investors including OKX Ventures, ABCDE, and Comma3 Ventures among some Asian capital. At the beginning of 2024, I encountered many European and American capital firms at EthDenver, including Framework Ventures, Alliance DAO, and Asymmetric, which later also participated in the investment.

That seed round, combined with the release of the white paper and the mainnet launch, propelled ecosystem development. Since the mainnet went live in April last year, there have been approximately 71 million transactions and over 200 projects deployed, with around 10 active projects currently. The peak TVL approached $900 million and is now maintained at over $700 million, still ranking first on Defillama. Additionally, the BitVM cross-chain bridge has completed testing and launched on the mainnet, and our Bitcoin chain asset YBTC has been deployed on several leading protocols.

PANews: What is the team size, and how do the two co-founders divide their responsibilities?

Charlie: We are a technology-driven company, with about 60% of team members engaged in R&D work; the R&D team consists of about 35 full-time engineers, covering BitVM researchers, front-end and back-end developers, and security roles. The team mainly comprises Asian developers, with some colleagues from Europe and the U.S. There are over ten non-technical positions responsible for operations, business, and media affairs. The overall company size is about 50 full-time employees.

In terms of division of labor, I am responsible for business, strategy, and partnerships, including media outreach, developer relations, financing, and exchanges and liquidity connections. Aside from R&D and product development, most other matters fall under my responsibilities. Kevin is responsible for overall product development and technical research, making decisions and strategic choices related to technology.

High Failure Rate in the Bitcoin L2 Space: How Does Bitlayer Remain Resilient?

PANews: There are numerous cases of failure, suspension, or transformation among Bitcoin Layer2 projects. What are the reasons?

Charlie: I believe the main issues are insufficient financing, lack of team experience, and inadequate technical accumulation. Early investors typically do not look at revenue because it is common for products not to be launched and for there to be no revenue. Therefore, they focus more on the team's background, understanding of the industry, and whether the technical solution is innovative or differentiated. Timing is also crucial; local resources, operational capabilities after the mainnet launch, the ability to attract or gain support from major players, and the ability to recruit excellent developers and facilitate institutional collaborations all directly impact a project's success or failure.

Additionally, networking and credibility are equally important. We can connect with early partners like Chainlink, LayerZero, and Nansen, and have established strategic partnerships with Antpool, F2Pool, and SpiderPool—resources that many teams lack. Finally, technology must be innovative; simply copying or outsourcing is unlikely to sustain long-term survival. Many projects that claimed to be doing BTCFi or BTC L2 last year ultimately shut down, and very few have managed to persist.

PANews: What are Bitlayer's differentiated advantages?

Charlie: BitVM is our core technical strategy and choice. We believe that achieving Bitcoin scalability (especially verification capabilities) without relying on hard forks or soft forks of the mainnet is the only pragmatic path. If we depend on mainnet upgrades, the implementation timeline will be indefinitely delayed or even impossible.

The design of BitVM combines the security of Bitcoin with Ethereum-like programmable verification capabilities, allowing verification to be completed in an EVM-like environment, thereby unlocking the potential for verification capabilities. Based on this feasibility assessment, we chose to fully invest in related research and engineering innovation. Since 2023, we have been one of the earliest core teams in Asia to initiate and continuously advance this direction.

Moreover, our development team is also an advantage, consisting of many senior engineers from large enterprises and blockchain projects, such as the Huobi Public Chain team, Alibaba Super Chain team, and engineers with practical experience in DA at Celestia and ZK at Aztec. The team is primarily composed of Asian members, with some colleagues from Europe and the U.S., forming a diverse and competitive R&D lineup.

This has allowed us to have a solid accumulation in research and engineering implementation, with strong execution capabilities and faster responsiveness. As a result, we achieved the mainnet launch earlier than some similar teams—our mainnet went live last year, while many competitors are still in the testnet phase.

Overall, our technological foresight, large enterprise background, and high execution capabilities, combined with practical experience in linking Eastern and Western markets and institutions/communities, give us a clear competitive advantage in both technical routes and market implementation. Our operations team also has backgrounds from Tencent and ByteDance, adept at combining Web2 strategies with Web3 products. The practices over the past year have preliminarily validated our strategies and capabilities.

Technological Innovation and Ambitions in Business Landscape

PANews: How is Bitlayer's commercial layout?

Charlie: One of our core OKRs/KPIs is to expand the business scale and usage volume of YBTC on-chain. YBTC is an upgradable BTC asset that enters through a decentralized bridge on a one-to-one basis based on BitVM. Our goal is to scale the on-chain YBTC to over 10,000 BTC by the end of the year and provide sufficient liquidity in top blue-chip protocols, allowing more users to recognize and use YBTC—essentially creating a decentralized version of WBTC while showcasing the BitVM bridge technology and security behind it.

On the ecological level, the upstream liquidity of YBTC can be supplied by various Bitcoin asset providers, while we are responsible for providing infrastructure (such as TPL) for underlying protocols. When underlying protocols discuss the BTC ecosystem, we are one of their important BitVM partners and contributors to TVL. We have currently established cooperation with nine ecosystems and received grant support from a foundation as an investor. With the launch of Bitlayer v2 mainnet, we will also foster more unique applications—teams are already deeply collaborating on prediction markets, options products around Bitcoin assets, and high-concurrency trading systems similar to Hyperliquid. Some blue-chip Ethereum protocols like Morpho and Aave are also advancing their deployment on our chain, and the deployment work is progressing in an orderly manner.

On the institutional side, we are simultaneously accelerating the connection of institutional products and large buy opportunities: against the backdrop of the rise of ETFs/ETPs, over-the-counter purchases, and institutional products, we are promoting ETP solutions and exploring collaborations with Bitcoin reserve-type enterprises and other large holders to provide feasible yield paths for their assets. For example, ProCap founder Anthony Pompliano recently became our investor, and I interviewed him in New York. Both parties are discussing cooperation scenarios aimed at these holding companies, with the goal of providing stable and sustainable yield solutions for their BTC reserves.

PANews: Bitlayer recently released the 2.0 white paper, mentioning many significant technological development plans. Which of these are your team most concerned about and worth users' expectations?

Charlie: The BitVM Bridge, built on BitVM technology, has completed testing and auditing and will officially launch the mainnet Beta in mid-2025. It is now in a production environment and has established connections or collaborations with multiple Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks, including Solana, Sui, Base, Arbitrum, Cardano, and Starknet. This bridge uses a fraud proof and operator challenge mechanism based on Bitcoin scripts, significantly reducing the trust risks associated with centralized multi-signature mappings (like WBTC), allowing challenges and transaction verification in case of suspected transaction anomalies or hacking attacks.

At the same time, we are advancing B2, a Rollup infrastructure with BitVM as the verification core, aimed at achieving Bitcoin-equivalent security: this solution supports anchoring transaction proofs to Bitcoin blocks and is currently in the final auditing stage. As one of the core development teams of the BitVM Alliance, we are responsible for implementing key modules, code auditing, and bug bounty work, making original contributions in areas such as reducing proof size and optimizing verification costs, and we have publicly published technical articles. We play a leading role in this module and have promoted multiple implementation efforts.

Looking ahead, the vision for V3 is to introduce parallel execution and higher throughput architecture while maintaining Bitcoin-equivalent security, supporting high-frequency, low-latency DeFi and trading protocols, and becoming a high-performance computing layer in the Bitcoin ecosystem. This route is inspired by the practices of Alibaba's Super Chain, and our current core architect, Daniel, previously led related technologies.

In the next 8–12 months, we will focus on promoting the engineering implementation and landing of V3. Of course, this technical challenge is significant, and our ambitions are also quite large.

BTR Token Launching Soon

PANews: What specific utilities does BTR have, and how does it empower the ecosystem and users?

Charlie: We are one of the first Bitcoin projects to complete a public offering on CoinList in 2025, bringing nearly 20,000 participants from regions including Europe, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Southeast Asia. We are also the first project to conduct an IDO on the GoMining platform. GoMining is a Bitcoin cloud computing power platform with about 3.6 million users, helping us reach a large number of users in Europe and the U.S. We hope to use these channels to let more people recognize BitLayer and understand the business scenarios and value of BTCFi.

Regarding the core functions of BTR, we are currently focusing on three main areas. 1. Governance: BTR holders can initiate and participate in network governance votes to decide on network-related proposals. 2. Node Staking: Staking BTR can serve as a qualification condition to become a node, which will share network transaction fees and bridge-related revenues. 3. Gas: Currently, on-chain gas is settled using wrapped BTC from Layer 2; in the future, BTR may potentially become the network's gas token or participate in fee mechanism design through voting.

The TGE of the BTR token has been preheated on channels like Binance Alpha, and it is confirmed to launch on August 27. Mainstream exchanges that have reached cooperation include Bitget, Gate, MEXC, and LBank. Discussions are also ongoing with Coinbase, but that exchange has a pre-listing restriction, requiring no further financing within six months before listing, so the official listing may have to wait six months. Communication with Korean exchange Upbit is also ongoing, but not fully confirmed yet.

Opportunities and Challenges in an Institution-Led Bull Market

PANews: Is the development of BTCFi in line with expectations? Compared to the early days of entrepreneurship, have your perceptions of Bitlayer's development plans and the entire BTCFi track changed?

Charlie: Overall, the on-ground business related to Bitcoin is smaller and more concentrated than initially expected. The once highly popular inscriptions and BRC-20 have seen a significant decline in consensus and activity, with many projects stagnating—network congestion and high gas fees are among the important reasons. BRC-20 and inscription-type assets have limited functionality and practical use cases, which I had anticipated at the time.

Another obvious change is that this bull market is institution-led, unlike in 2021 when it was driven by a large number of retail investors. The new liquidity, funds, and users are more from institutions, so Bitcoin DeFi centered around institutions will become a key battleground, and we need to explore and lay out strategies in this direction.

Our core validation point is clear: to release Bitcoin's liquidity, allowing Bitcoin assets to find sustainable business scenarios in blue-chip DeFi protocols. The goal is to create long-term value for Bitcoin holders, including retail, large holders, and institutions. For example, by introducing Bitcoin into the ecosystem through a decentralized and trustworthy cross-chain bridge, the minted YBTC/YBDC can generate reasonable and sustainable yields, rather than relying on short-term incentives from inflation or subsidies.

Compared to the short-term speculative frenzy around inscriptions at the end of 2023, where many chased after so-called "hundredfold coins," the current market is gradually returning to balance on both the supply and demand sides, with sentiment being more rational.

PANews: In this institutional bull market, what opportunities and challenges does Bitlayer face?

Charlie: It is now a consensus that institutional inflows have become a reality. ETFs and large over-the-counter orders (such as those from institutions like BlackRock) have brought sustained and scaled buying power to the market, driving prices higher in the long term.

This bull market is significantly different from the retail-driven cycle of 2021—the current rise relies more on institutional funds and liquidity. Institutions have brought stable large buy orders and deep liquidity, and with the macro environment gradually easing (such as potential interest rate cuts) and regulatory frameworks loosening, more institutional products and complex financial engineering will emerge, providing us with the opportunity to become the infrastructure providers needed for these products.

At the same time, we can explore cooperation with companies holding large amounts of BTC (similar to MicroStrategy) to create feasible yield scenarios for their assets.

However, the deep involvement of Wall Street also brings challenges. The market will be more driven by large institutions and financial engineering, which may lead to manipulation, hedging, and "whale" behavior, changing the market landscape and shortening the time window for startup teams to operate in the market.

While there are many opportunities, they do not necessarily fall into the hands of early-stage technical teams with limited resources; we face the risk of being squeezed in terms of resources and market position.

To this end, we will position ourselves as institutional-grade infrastructure providers and service providers, focusing on delivering stable, secure, and compliant foundational products, including sustainable yield paths, trustworthy cross-chain bridging, and efficient settlement services.

At the same time, we will actively establish partnerships with mining pools, custodial institutions, asset management companies, and large BTC holders to provide feasible yield solutions and technical support, thereby striving to secure and solidify our market position amid the trend of institutionalization.

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