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- 🟣 Chainlink expands to Bitcoin
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Bitcoin L2 Spiderchain uses Chainlink
Chart: Ethena USDe total supply jumps $200 million
Botanix Labs’ Spiderchain integrates Chainlink
Ethereum’s major oracle provider, Chainlink, is making moves in the growing ecosystem of BTCFi (Bitcoin Finance).
Botanix Labs, the team behind the EVM-compatible Bitcoin L2 Spiderchain, is integrating Chainlink’s data feeds to allow inter-blockchain communication to the world of EVM.
As part of the partnership, Botanix is participating in Chainlink Scale, a gas grant program that Chainlink offers to onboarded blockchains to initially cover the operating costs of their oracle networks.
Spiderchain is also integrating Chainlink’s cross-chain interoperability protocol (CCIP), which serves to enable programmable token/data transfers across different blockchains.
Johann Eid, chief business officer at Chainlink Labs, said “Botanix is the first Bitcoin layer-2 to join Scale, a significant step in helping its developers to build secure, scalable and fully-featured dapps on Bitcoin.”
Like other players in the BTCFi space, Spiderchain strives to unlock the use of BTC natively on the thousands of EVM-compatible dapps today.
Spiderchain explicitly eschews Bitcoin’s non-fungible UTXO (unspent transaction output) model while embracing Ethereum’s nimbler “account model.”
It’s a slow redefinition of what Bitcoin is traditionally known for. Bitcoin’s dominant narrative is being a digital gold-like “reserve” asset due to the blockchain’s lack of smart contract compatibility.
Spiderchain derives its name from its chain’s design. According to Botanix’s docs, the chain is a permissionless set of “distributed network of multisigs, safeguarded by a randomized subset of participants,” known as orchestrators.
Orchestrators deposit BTC into the multisig wallets as a kind of escrow bond to participate in consensus, and run a Bitcoin and Spiderchain node simultaneously.
A decentralized sequencer will be used from day one of Spiderchain’s launch. By leveraging Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade, Spiderchain is also able to accommodate a larger network of multisigs on the Bitcoin parent chain as is, without requiring any soft forks.
— Donovan Choy (X: @donovanchoy | Farcaster: @donovan)
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Ethena USDe on the rise:
The total supply of Ethena’s USDe synthetic dollar saw a $200 million growth to $2.61 billion over the last week. This marks USDe’s first uptick in growth since a slow retraction from an all-time high of $3.61 billion on July 3, 2024. sUSDe (staked USDe) rates are currently 13% after plummeting from an average 45% APY since last March.
Sui’s bet on gaming
Boccaccio: Sui seems to be much more gaming and consumer-focused, whereas Aptos’s focus is on RWAs and institutions. Two different approaches — who has the right answer?
Danny Knettel: With successful mobile games like Clash of Clans, the revenue model that works is typically a small subset of whales pushing a ton of volume, as opposed to many users spending a few dollars. The caveat is that you do need a lot of small players before the whales enter the picture.
Ryan Connor: The target addressable market (TAM) for gaming is huge, like $200+ billion. I’d argue that a lot of that TAM is not accessible to crypto because gamers favor large studios. The top three shooter games generate 70% of the genre’s revenue, which are incumbents. Gamers love mainstay titles that have been around forever, like Call of Duty. So when I see mega funds on Arbitrum targeting gaming, I question the strategy.
Boccaccio: I don’t think crypto games compete with the big AAA games. I see them as fitting more into a category of niche games that have a loyal fanbase spending thousands of hours playing with mods on it. I think crypto appeals to that side of gaming.
Is there a first-mover advantage in crypto?
Ryan Connor: It’s hard to have a first-mover advantage in crypto given the open-source nature and lower switching costs. But last-mover advantage is a real thing in crypto. Take Chainlink vs. Pyth, for instance. Chainlink made the very obvious mistake of focusing on security over speed…and having meaningful frictions for integration, high fees, and then pushing prices to the apps that used it, rather than letting those apps pull those prices when they need it. Pyth saw that and decided to go to market with this new model, which is massively outperforming in terms of market share now.
Danny Knettel: I think first-mover advantage in crypto is overstated. You could have tried to launch pump.fun in 2014, but maybe it would not have worked due to the industry's large focus on proof-of-work-related blockchains then. Today, we're in a much different market layout. I think just timing of innovations and your go-to market strategy of how it serves consumers is another big factor that gets overlooked when we talk about first-mover advantage in a vacuum.
Kamino has solidified its position as the leading money market on Solana, and is emerging as a DeFi bluechip. Although DeFi competition is fierce, Kamino has kept iterating on its product to provide the best in-class UX, paired with a robust risk management framework and battle-tested infrastructure. Given the rollout of Kamino Lend v2, the protocol may scale aggressively over the coming months, penetrating previously untapped markets in Solana DeFi.
Despite Off The Grid’s early success through a well-planned marketing campaign, it currently lacks a native token. While AVAX could be considered a way to gain exposure, the economics don't align, once again highlighting the recurring issue with modular networks: They often undercharge their customers, failing to fully capitalize on their product's value.
Financial institutions are weighing the business case for tokenizing assets and regulatory considerations, Ripple’s James Wallis said.
Kraken’s launch of Ink will be the Superchain’s 24th fully participating network.
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The insights, views and outlooks presented in the report are not to be taken as financial advice. Blockworks Research analysts are not registered broker/dealers or financial advisors. Blockworks Research analysts may hold assets mentioned in this report, further outlined in the Firm’s Financial Disclosures.