How To Make Money While Holding Bitcoin | Charlie Hu
8/13/2025 · 43 min · transcript via mlx
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Key topics
— Asian retail investors and Western financial institutions are converging around Bitcoin through different adoption paths; Asia drove 80% of early ordinals creation, while Western institutions entered via ETF vehicles.
— Bitcoin DeFi differs fundamentally from sidechains by requiring transaction finality and settlement on the Bitcoin blockchain itself, not just on parallel systems.
— BitLayer's BVM (Bitcoin Virtual Machine) infrastructure enables verification components previously unavailable on Bitcoin's layer one, using zero-knowledge proofs to verify transactions without congesting the base layer.
— BitLayer has launched its BVM Bridge mainnet for trust-minimized Bitcoin bridging and is weeks away from releasing its Bitcoin security-equivalent rollup with the Bitcoin Verifier.
— True Bitcoin DeFi use cases include perpetual DEXs, lending pools, yield strategies, and high-frequency trading protocols—all settling transactions to Bitcoin's base layer while maintaining decentralization and security.
Market & price signals
— None discussed.
Actionable insights
— Bitcoin ETF staking approval (expected first in Europe, then US) will unlock major adoption by allowing institutional capital to earn yield on Bitcoin holdings within regulated ETF wrappers—a significant catalyst for Bitcoin DeFi growth.
— BitLayer's infrastructure is live and seeing real adoption: 3 million daily active users, 20+ active DeFi protocols, and 70+ million transactions; retention from educational campaigns (via Binance Wallet partnership) is driving sustainable ecosystem growth.
— Total Value Locked (TVL) is useful but incomplete; focus equally on transaction volume, active use cases, and user retention to avoid metrics gaming; BitLayer recently hit #1 Bitcoin DeFi TVL alongside growing on-chain transaction activity.
Episode sponsorships
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