- Cardano said Bitcoin is “coming back into the family and innovating again” and that its DeFi ecosystem will dwarf those of Ethereum and Solana.
- Cardano recently partnered with BitcoinOS, BTC's smart contract platform, giving the ADA family access to BTC's $1.3 trillion in liquidity.
For over a decade, the narrative has been that Bitcoin is only good as digital gold and a hedge against inflation, and that all the heavy lifting for dApps, NFTs, DeFi, etc. is left to Ethereum. However, as we reported, Bitcoin has changed recently and is now competing with Ethereum, Solana, and all other smart contract platforms in these lucrative markets. According to Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, BTC will overtake all these rivals and become the king of DeFi.
Cardano recently announced a partnership with BitcoinOS, a platform that provides smart contracts for BTC. This partnership will give the ADA ecosystem access to the $1.3 Bitcoin network without intermediaries. The two rely on the BOS Grail bridge, which provides a trustless connection between the two networks, allowing dApps in the Cardano ecosystem to access BTC liquidity without intermediaries.
The partnership has led Hoskinson to reconsider his long-held claim that Ethereum will not be a long-term winner in the crypto space.
“DeFi is coming to Bitcoin, and it will dwarf what Solana and Ethereum did,” he wrote to X.
Now Bitcoin is back in the family and is innovating once again. Thanks to you @BTC_OSWe will restart the Bitcoin Education Project in 2025 and create a new edition of the course. We also plan to prepare Aiken education for Bitcoin developers. This includes hosting in…
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) October 25, 2024
Cardano’s Bitcoin DeFi
As of this writing, Bitcoin's market capitalization is $1.33 trillion, four times that of second-place Ethereum. However, Ethereum still dominates every aspect of decentralized applications. For example, while the total amount locked in Ethereum is $47.2 billion, there is only $2.184 billion in BTC, and this is after a 150% increase in the last month alone.
This disparity is mainly due to Bitcoin's lack of smart contracts. DeFi requires smart contracts as there are no intermediaries, and for over a decade it was thought that BTC could not support smart contracts. However, solutions like BitcoinOS show that developers can deploy applications on top of Bitcoin. The launch of Ordinals (Bitcoin's wildly popular NFT solution, even overtaking Ethereum NFTs at one point) also opened up vast possibilities on the network for BTC holders.
But the future of DeFi on Bitcoin likely lies in cross-chain integration. Although it is now possible to deploy smart contracts on networks, it is still slow and expensive, and this requires extensive changes and even forks.
Therefore, solutions like the partnership between Cardano and BitcoinOS offer one of the biggest opportunities for BTC holders. As BitcoinOS explained, this is advantageous for both altcoins and BTC. It stated:
Altcoins can now leverage Bitcoin’s security as a layer 2 solution. Bitcoin evolves without changing its basic code, and cryptocurrencies acquire new technologies based on solid foundations.
BTC changed hands at $67,000 and has been trading flat for the past day.
