A

Bankless Nation. I'm here with David Se Roy, otherwise known as Bitcoin Dave. Bitcoin Dave, welcome back onto the podcast. It's been a while. How you doing?

B

Yeah, thanks. You actually originally coined that name Bitcoin Dave. And you know, I still think I'm Bitcoin Dave. But you are. You're no longer Ethereum Dave.

A

I'm no longer Ethereum Dave. Yeah, I'm just Bankless David. Okay. Bitcoin Dave. Bitcoin has this manifest destiny to hyper bitcoinize the world. I don't know if you believe that, but that's kind of like one of the original views of the path of bitcoin as a monetary asset to just blanket the world, denominate everything in btc. Are we still on that path?

B

I think so, yeah. I mean, I think the thesis of bitcoin is pretty well established and it's one of the few things in our entire industry that almost everybody agrees has legitimacy. Bitcoin as legitimacy, you know, non sovereign sound money, what is still up for debate is kind of like what's next and beyond after that. For me personally, I do think that, you know, bitcoin needs, you know, programmability, maybe not on the layer one, but, you know, in these more expressive layer twos. And so I do think that there is huge unlocks that are enabled for bitcoin as money if you can add more trustless computation to bitcoin. So that's kind of how I think about the future when I, when I

A

say the words manifest destiny of bitcoin. The. That's comes from this idea of just like bitcoiners have just memed bitcoin to where it is today and it's just been accepted. The world has just like absorbed bitcoin into, you know, its vernacular, into its portfolios. And the brand of bitcoin has just done phenomenally well. I think, like, much to the frustration of like the Ethereum crowd, where the Ethereum crowd was like, we really need to build Ethereum and it's going to be hard and there are challenges to overcome. And I think when Ethereum people look over the fence at the bitcoin world and be like, man, they just had it so easy. All they had to do was meme bitcoin into hyper bitcoinization. Do you, do you agree with that kind of like, lens?

B

No, no. Like people have always said, like, money is a meme. And like, I, I get that, that there is like a somewhat social consensus around what is money. But there also are like actual properties that make money, good money. And bitcoin does embody those properties and you cannot just meme them into existence. You know, like a lot of the properties of bitcoin are actually what allowed the memes to take off. And if those properties did not exist, then the memes would not. So while I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea that like things need to be built, there needs to be this kind of programmable ecosystem in some of the Ethereum arguments, at the end of the day it's like not just a mean Bitcoin has the best properties of money.

A

So do you think that bitcoin is still on this like long arc of hyper bitcoinization or I don't know what the word is, Hyper Bitcoinization. I feel like I'm dating myself because that's like a pre2020 word. But like, I don't know what word you guys use these days.

B

I think at the very least some form of bitcoin is inevitable. Like I very much. I think the sovereign debt crisis is a major issue. I do think that, you know, eventually we will hit a kind of strong phase of monetary debasement. I'm not sure that AI is going to entirely bail us out of that crisis. And I do think bitcoin is in prime position and arguably sole position to capitalize on that now. To what extent it capitalizes, it could potentially be capped somewhat by Bitcoin's limitations. If we just keep things as the status quo, it's like great, it's a non sovereign store of value that is probably good enough to be a world changing asset, but can you do better than that? And I think that's kind of really what we're pushing at the frontier of Bitcoin is kind of exploring is there more, is there more to be desired here?

A

Yeah, that's something I want to talk about today. I still want to kind of like hash out this idea. And the reason why I ask with this framing is that every single cycle of sorts, cycle, the 2017 cycle to the 2021 cycle to the 20245 cycle, I guess is like it's marked by bitcoin growing in some sort of step function way in adop and legitimacy and price. And you know, when Bitcoin peaked in 2017, 2018, it was still a bunch of retail, but you got your first idea of like, you know, institutions and people building very large businesses around this. This is like when Mike, Mike, Mike Novogratz went from just like a speculator to like he Started to build galaxy in 2017, 2018, and then in 2020-2021, you had Michael Sailor first start to do the whole bitcoin treasury thing. And then now moving now, here we are and like Sailors once again trying to like, elevate bitcoin from digital gold to digital capital. And every, every single cycle, like bitcoin just grows in one step function values like step up in terms of just like how adopted and legitimate and valuable it is as an asset. But I don't think every future step function is guaranteed. And so while previous eras of bitcoiners have done a phenomenal job not, not faking it, but like, memeing the properties of bitcoin into awareness, the very strong properties of bitcoin that it has. As, as you said, the. The bitcoiner, like community layer on bitcoin have done a very good job elevating and pushing bitcoin up the hill. The next step function increase in bitcoin is not guaranteed, even though it seemingly has done very, very well previously. These are kind of like my thoughts and, and so that's kind of why I wanted to get you on to see like, okay, what, what does the next that function look like? And how well is bitcoin positioned to actually, like, achieve that?

B

Yeah, I mean, bitcoin's at an interesting point in time. Like, obviously not saying anything groundbreaking here, just the larger it is, the harder it is to move the price. I also do think that institutions did come into bitcoin, but not necessarily to buy bitcoin, but more to tamper the volatility. And so institutions are here, but they are volatility suppression machines. And a lot of bitcoins, the memetics that you kind of talked about, the price, it is a byproduct of the volatility, you know, craziness. And, and, and so I think some of that has been somewhat muted. They're also in bitcoin land. Like, we're kind of in a phase change right now. I think a lot of the, you know, there's no leaders in bitcoin, but like, there were kind of high priests, so to speak. I think a lot of them are just tired and, you know, and they want to start families and they don't want to be involved anymore. And they kind of maybe occasionally want to, you know, post on, you know, irc, but like, they, they don't want to necessarily like, steward the protocol anymore. And so there is kind of like bitcoin is so big that there are now multiple competing priorities. There are people that care about privacy, there are people that care about money, there are people that, you know are anti data. Like is kind of a big beast right now. And I think the core narrative that everyone aligns on is bitcoin is money. But beyond that, there are a kind of lot of people that are kind of vying for their vision of bitcoin and I don't know that bitcoin has entirely sorted that out yet. So the future direction is still somewhat being decided and it frankly, it might go in multiple directions.

A

How would you characterize the current state of bitcoin in the bitcoin community and bitcoin development and overall the whole entire ecosystem? How would you characterize it today as it in comparison to previous eras of bitcoin? What is it like to be in the trenches of bitcoin development and progress today?

B

Well, for me, I feel like the stuff that I work on at Alpen Lab is, you know, we kind of pioneered these concepts of ZK roll ups into existence. And so for me, the vibes has never been better. It's like, holy, we're freaking doing it, man. Like, we're no longer complaining on X. Like, we're just building every day. We can do this without a soft fork and like, I don't need to battle down in the X trenches trying to, you know, you know, get like a certain soft fork in or, or anything like that. It's like we're just building. So for me, fantastic. I think in general bitcoin, I think the vibes are down, you know, probably in the same way that the general vibes are down for a lot of the industry. However, the true believers in bitcoin, most of them just don't really care. They're very comfortable in a crowd market and they're just like, I don't care, dude. And so the thing that is nice about bitcoin is like you always have those people that will kind of anchor the foundation and be comfortable just moving forward.

A

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C

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A

Do they they don't care in the sense that like we need a lot of people to care about crypto and like really be motivated in order to 10x these prices. And so you know, Bitcoin at $60,000 right now, like we need people to care to get it to $600,000. And I one thing I'm kind of worried about is like a lot of the evangelists across the industry, bitcoin included, but also every everywhere else, like to some degree, a lot, a lot of people are just like cha. Like they've been in it for a decade plus. They're trying to move on with their lives. Bitcoin or crypto or ethereum has been like hammering in their brain ever since they got into it. It was their first career, it's been their only career. They want kids. And so at the same time that that's happening, crypto is just not cool. And so all young talent is going into AI and we're not actually replacing some of the leadership and talent. Is that also happening in bitcoin?

B

I don't think it's happening as bad in, in bitcoin as it is in, in crypto, frankly. And like, I think, you know, some things are coming home to roof, so to speak, in crypto where it's like, look, a lot of these use cases suck, right? There's like no product market fit and people are like, why am I wasting time on this? Like, you know, like, you just go after these token narratives and they drop 99%. Like, AI is, is so much cooler. So like, I actually do think it's a bit of a crisis for like broader crypto for bitcoin. Like, people are pretty deeply convicted in that kind of, again, the monetary thesis and like, you know, the eventual debasement trade. So I don't think it's as bad in, in, in bitcoin land.

A

So last I checked in with you and with bitcoin, technically, on the technical roadmap to bitcoin, not that there is a specific roadmap, but there are potential futures. It was all about the bit VM&ZK technology adding expressivity to, to, to bitcoin. And that was like in 2024, 2023, 2024, maybe you can update us on like what technological progress looks like in the bitcoin world. Like, what are people trying to do other than like all the censorship stuff, which is like, I understand that to be surely shenanigans that we don't really need to talk about. So all the, what's the, what's a technical upgrade? Upgrade update to the bitcoin project.

B

Sure. So I'll go back. 2020 was Bitcoin's last software, something called Taproot. We didn't know it at that time, but it allowed you to embed arbitrary data into the bitcoin blockchain. So some people use that to post JPEGs into Bitcoin layer one. But there were some researchers who said, hey, you could build new types of layer twos, like rollups. And so people wrote these kind of research papers that said we could build a rollup on Bitcoin and if we had a soft fork, we could actually build a ZK rollup on top of bitcoin. About a year after those kind of core research papers came out, there was another paper that you kind of alluded to called Bit DM from Robin Linus. And they said we could bring some form, a kind of like weaker form of ZK verification to Bitcoin without any sort of software whatsoever. And so the core idea here is typically if you want to bridge bitcoin, including into like a rollup, you would take bitcoin from the layer one, you would lock it into some sort of multisig. But instead of that being a threshold where maybe six out of the 10 entities could move the funds, even if nine of those are malicious, as long as there's one single honest operator in that multisig, then the funds are cryptographically secure. And so that is the core promise of bit DM and then bit VM2 and bit VM3 and like this whole family of bitVM products, it's like a one of n trust us option. So it's not necessarily permissionless, it's not trustless, but it's very, very strong. And much of the research over the past couple of years since I last came on here and chatted has been pretty hardcore research again, going from bit VM1 to bit VM2, which has a different set of trade offs to bit VM3 to this kind of concept of what we call garbled circuits. And all of this is really just to get us to a more elegant and cleaner way to bring a form of ZK verification to bitcoin. And that is kind of where the current state of things are. There is one live ZK rollup on Bitcoin, but it uses BitVM 2, which I think has some pretty material trade offs. But now everybody's kind of shifting to this family that we call bitvm3, which is a concept known as garbled circuits.

A

So is it, has it been possible to build a layer 2 product on top of bitcoin with bitvm1? Bit VM2? You just said that somebody did do it and now we're bit VM3. It seems like bitcoiners are kind of doing the bitcoiner thing, which is like, let's just wait for technical perfection and then we'll start building product. Is that about right?

B

There is some truth to that. So in BM1, the long story short is is that to perform the ZK verification it took a lot of time, like, like it could take months of time to perform the verification. BM2 said we can bring that down to two weeks, but the onchain costs were very, very high. BM3 says, hey, we can, you know, perform this faster and we can move everything offchain. But the trade off is you have to store larger bits of data offchain. So it's kind of continually compressed, like squeeze the balloon to a better and better trade off until we've kind of finally gotten to a design where it's like, oh, like this is not going to, you're not going to be required to spend $200,000 in a block to, you know, perform ZK verification and you're not gonna have to wait six months to bridge out your funds. That's, that, that, that, that's really why we've kind of pivoted.

A

I'm reminded of that meme of like the SpaceX rockets, like the rocket one, rocket two, rocket three. And like one's just super fucking complicated and then two looks a little lean and then like three looks like it's just super sleek and there's not many moving parts and everything, everything's like really refined. Sounds like that.

B

Yeah, I think that's a good image.

A

Are, are we done at bitvm3? Is that bit VM3 is the one?

B

No.

A

Okay, so Bibian4.

B

I, I, I would say Bibium3 was like a pretty significant. It, it, it's like, hey, like this is finally good enough, but you can do even better, and you can do better. It's just a matter of engineering. There is some, like, I wasn't going to mention this, but there are some like, kind of mythical forms of cryptography that are happening that I think can enable some really powerful stuff. Like, like there's a team, the Alloc Init team, like, like Misha's team, who released a paper called like pipes v2. Long story short, it's like you could kind of bring a form of what's called Witness encryption is kind of in this category of like mythical forms of cryptography to Bitcoin without a soft fork. And if you could do that, then you could actually have like, things like covenants and native ZK verification. So whether it's bit BM3, an iteration of that, or down the line, this very sexy cryptography, like, I'm quite confident that all of this is coming to Bitcoin.

A

And, and so what does it actually, what actually is produced at this? So like on Ethereum we have Ethereum layer twos. They're EVM layer twos. So they look like the Ethereum layer one, but they are just way more scaled. But that can't be also true for Bitcoin because you don't carbon copy the whole Bitcoin layer one and make it layer two. It's something different. So with the bit VM3 or whatever emerges out of these ZK rollups, what does the actual layer two look like? How, how like understanding, like the frame of mind of my listeners, which is going to be like, what AN Ethereum layer 2 is how, how, how should they think about what that layer two looks like and is, versus it's actually

B

going to look very similar to roll ups on Ethereum, something like Optimism or Arbitrum. So you have the layer one.

A

So an evm, it's an EVM chain

B

in our case and I think other teams it is an evm. However, the way that we've actually architected this and we haven't really kind of announced this because the focus is the evm, but it will be able to support multiple, I guess what you can call execution domains. So you'd have the Bitcoin layer one. You kind of have almost like a middleware layer of just like the bridge and that could go into an evm, but it also is kind of like an open permissionless layer where anyone can tap in. And from that bridge you could bridge it to Ethereum or Solana. You could deploy your own custom execution environment, you know, like Cairo or you know, like a lighter perp stacks like that is kind of where it's going is this multichain vision that can exist on a rollup.

A

So it's like, it's like a modular middleware that connects the security of Bitcoin to btc, the asset and like kind of like pipes it to anywhere it can go. And the reason why it can do that is because of zk.

B

Yeah, I mean, so our design in particular was actually inspired. People may be familiar with this, something from Celestia called ZK accounts.

D

Right.

B

And so in Celestia they have kind of like their layer one that has all the data availability and then they almost have like a thin layer where it has no programmability to it, there's no programming language, but it can only just settle and interpret zero knowledge proofs. And so anyone that can create a chain, as long as it can be create a zero knowledge proof can be created, which pretty much everything can. It can settle to one of these ZK accounts on Celestia's kind of like thin layer. And then you could have a different chain that settles there. And then these ZK proofs can either be aggregated or they can speak to each other. And, and so now you kind of break out of this vision where maybe the EVM becomes kind of the mothership, but nobody is obligated to use the evm. Like if you want to create your own ecosystem, you can. I think in reality the EVM is probably going to be the dominant one

A

going back to BTC's arc of hyper Bitcoinization and Then like blanketing the world in a bitcoin denominated world. What bottleneck are we trying to fix here with this? I know like we're trying to add expressivity and scalability to bitcoin. But what do you think that really opens up and adds to the actual market cap of BTT the asset? Because I could equally see an argument where somebody says, well, if we really want bitcoin to go to $600,000, I don't really care what you're doing, David. I want Michael Sailor just to buy more. And actually that's more worth my time and energy and attention. So like what's the argument that, that this is the correct bottleneck for unlocking the most amount of market cap in bitcoin?

B

Well, we can if you want, but, but I really think you have to kind of rebuild the repo market like the credit market on top of bitcoin. You know, the repo market is really where pretty much all of the vast majority of wealth and dollars in the world exists. And whoever anchors repo, that that is the true exorbitant privilege. And I think that you can rebuild a superior form of repo on top of bitcoin. And I'm not saying that because it's like, oh, bitcoin's great and it's decentralized and it's this big market cap. I'm saying that like I think people will see that, that the economics of what you can build on chain with a bitcoin back repo system is superior to what the economics are off chain and tradfi. And when that happens, you will start amassing huge sickening amounts of, of capital into bitcoin. Not because they care about bitcoin or they're aligned with the values, but simply because the economics for the dollar system are superior.

A

So your answer to like why this is just the most effective thing we can do in order to increase the value of a bitcoin is that we want to have a bitcoin backed repo market. And you do that with a bit vbm, bit VM number four or whatever. And to get that expressivity and security onto a new layer that can actually integrate with the repo market.

B

Let me take a step back and explain how the current banking system works. There's the onshore dollar system and then there's the offshore dollar system, the onshore dollar, Federal Reserve at the top. And then it has the commercial banks like Wells Fargo Chase, you know, bank of America, etc underneath it. And the Federal Reserve can create these things Called bank reserves. Right. You can think of these in defi terms. These are like a permissioned stablecoin where only the commercial banks can interact and send these amongst each other. So the Federal Reserve can print them out of thin air, but they're only transferable within the banks. The banks then of course they can create a separate form of money by lending dollars into existence. And this is the type of money that you and I interact with. We go and buy coffee with, etc. And so when a bank creates a loan, maybe they lend you a million dollars. Eventually you want to send that, maybe you want to send that to me. And we use different banks. When the banks settle amongst each other, they're not sending the liabilities or the credit IOUs they created, they're sending the bank reserves. So the bank reserves act as the trusted settlement layer between these different commercial banks. Now we have to look at the offshore dollar system and we say there's tons of people offshore that use and want dollars, but they don't necessarily have access to the commercial banking system. And because they're not always as regulated, they can just create credit out of, out of thin air with really like no reserve requirements. Like they could in theory do zero reserve requirement, fractional reserve lending. They can just boom, boom. David, I just created you a billion dollars. But what they are ultimately limited by is eventually that credit that's kind of created in this shadow banking system that nobody sees it just on private ledgers. Eventually somebody says well I want to send that to a customer, I want to use it to fund a factory. And eventually they actually have to settle that. The shadow bank has to go from these kind of shadowy IOUs that they created to a legitimate form of a dollar. And they don't have access to bank reserves because they're not part of the Federal Reserve stack. And so this is really the gap that, that, that repo bridges. Repo says you can come up and you can post what we'll call pristine collateral. For now it's, it's US Treasuries and then we will lend you dollars and specifically a form of dollars that has access to the US settlement rails. And so there's, you imagine huge amounts of liabilities and credit that's created in the shadow banking system that has to squeeze through this tiny door of repo in order to, to, to, to settle. And so 20 plus years ago, the primary collateral that would have been used is something like, maybe not the primary, but a major one is mortgage backed securities. Right. People posted mortgage backed securities as Collateral and then they borrowed dollars in repo. And so that is the exorbitant privilege that went to real estate. People said they're starving for collateral because they need more settlement for the shadow banking system that pushes the price of mortgage backed securities up, which pushes the interest rates down. That's why interest rates were so low going into the great financial crisis. And then even that is not enough. There's still not enough collateral. So people take the, the mortgage backed securities and they rehypothecate it. They say, David, you can use this as collateral and Alice can use it as collateral and Bob can use it as collateral. And that's kind of what gave the exorbitant privilege to mortgages and real estate back in 2008. And then now it's transitioned to Treasuries. And when Treasuries are the primary form of collateral, that is what gives the US government exorbitant privilege because people need US Treasuries as collateral to settle all these repo and shadow banking dollar claims. And, and that's what allows the US government to, to continually borrowing in perpetuity at low interest rates. So I want to make it very clear. The vast majority of financial activity in the world goes through this thing called repo. And because of that, an exorbitant privilege accrues to whichever is the pristine collateral in repo. And so now if we map that onto onchain, onchain will need to recreate a repo system. And so there's three different components here. There's the collateral component, there's the actual borrowing and lending engine of repo. This is like aves morphos, fluids, et cetera. And then there's the actual settlement asset which is the kind of substitute for the bank reserves. Obviously stablecoins backed by Treasuries are the settlement asset. That's what people want. That's acceptable. There's kind of a battle for the actual repo market between all these different defi protocols. But the question is what is going to be the pristine prime collateral within this on chain repo market? And it's not going to be Bitcoin because Bitcoin is volatile, right? It has to be a dollar denominated asset. And so this is where something like Morpho Midnight, which I think actually got released like today, is very compelling. Okay. Because in Morpho Midnight in particular you can create like a vault, right? And that vault you can ISO, you can put dollars in, USDC goes in and then with Morphob in that you can lend it to all these different duration of bitcoin backed loans. Okay. You can isolate and say only Bitcoin, no other tokens whatsoever as collateral. And you can, some of Those dollars, maybe 20% of those dollars get loaned into variable interest rate, 20% into one month, three months, six, nine, 12 months, etc. The LP or the receipt token that you receive from that vault is basically in Trad 5, what we would call a CLO or a collateralized loan obligation. It is now a bitcoin collateralized loan obligation. It is like a dollar denominated, it's a yield bearing stablecoin backed by bitcoin backed loans. That instrument, that form of collateral in my opinion is the single best and most pristine collateral that can be created on chain, period, bar none. And I do think that that will kind of come become the basis of onchain repo, like the biggest and the largest dollar allocators in the world. They don't want to take any risk whatsoever. It's like why, why would you put your dollars into any other sort of money market fund or any other sort of stablecoin or RWA or whatever when you can just invest it into, into only bitcoin backed loans? And because you can now add duration with morpho, you can start increasing the interest rate on these. So instead of just earning like 4% in AAVE, you'll probably be earning 6, 7, 8, 9% on these Bitcoin collateralized loan obligations. And that is, that is the best risk adjusted yield that's possible on chain, in my opinion, with the deepest possible market. And that becomes the basis for now this, this, this repo. So I could kind of keep going here, but I'll, I'll see if that lands.

A

Yeah. So just to be clear, what we are not doing is we are not tinkering with the existing repo market. And we're not like we're building a parallel repo market with parallel structure. And the claim is that this side is going to grow very, very big. But we're not actually like integrating with like the current existing one. Correct.

B

Yeah, that's. That, that's exactly correct. And so there's a couple considerations here. One you could argue maybe people are saying, well why would you just not use tokenized treasuries RWAs and use those in something like, like AAVE and recreate repo that way? Well one, like I'm, I'm a little bit of a skeptic there. I mean one, you are, you have added trust assumptions, right? It's like one lawsuit and these things get censored and you know you're screwed. I think it's also just quite hard to build deep markets for these tokenized assets and they would just yield less than these bitcoin clos would. So I just think it's kind of inevitable. Like I challenge anybody to come up with a better form of collateral than, than kind of what I had just described. I think that will be again best risk adjusted yield and you'll be able to leverage it the highest, you'll be able to get the highest LTV which allows like the highest amount of looping or just profitability.

A

So it's a bitcoin backed loan and there's different tiers. And so like the reason why it is such high credit quality is a, it's bitcoin backed but then the yield is coming from like a natural market, naturally occurring market, not the Fed like determining what the interest rates are but like morpho in the market around morpho structuring, structuring loans. But it's all, isn't it all constrained by how many people who hold bitcoin want to get a loan on their bitcoin and how, like doesn't, how big is that market? Like not, not that big.

B

I think it's the biggest market on chain. I mean if you go and look at anything from back when you know, block, block by and Celsius existed to the kind of major lending books like Morpho and AAVE right now or Maple, I mean all of this stuff, bitcoin is always the biggest consistently so if anything is going to win.

A

But like I think if you, if the, if the idea is like we're going to restructure the repo like then then like we don't have a, you know, hold a candle to the size of the repo market.

B

That's fair. And maybe I don't want to like over promise here that it's like boom, we're going to replace repo, right? But I'm saying like if anybody is going to make a claim to being replacing repo on chain, how else can you make any other claim aside from, from, from bitcoin, right? Because that same argument that you just applied where it's like XYZ thing you want to do on chain, it pales in comparison to repo. It's like that's fine. But, but if you want to try to bring this on chain, in my opinion this is the only path.

A

Aren't you still constrained by the belief in bitcoin first and foremost. Like first, you still need bitcoin to have a very high value and to have a lot of holders. And then what you are describing here, what you are building on a layer two around bitcoin with morpho and bitcoin backlogs and then you unlock that. But the tail doesn't wag the dog, it doesn't go the other way. Not nearly as much as like first, you've primarily still we need to like meme bitcoin into like a $1 million asset first.

B

Yeah, I mean I do think that there's a flywheel that, that starts to potentially form here. But you, you are fundamentally correct that ultimately there have to be people that are willing to hold bitcoin and want to borrow against it and be willing to pay an interest rate to borrow it. I think the indication is that's like one of the few, if not the only use cases that people in bitcoin

A

actually want is to borrow against their bitcoin.

B

Yes, for sure.

A

One other thing that we've noticed or potentially potentially known is that bitcoiners don't really, other than what you're saying where like, you know, Celsius was very big, blockfi was very big. Like lending against your bitcoin was very, very big. But like putting bitcoin on a layer two or inside of a primitive defi structure that you could build on bitcoin or like really doing anything with your bitcoin is actually not a very common activity with bitcoiners broadly. What would you say to that?

B

A couple things. One, I think the Overton window is shifting. And even in private conversations that I have with teams that you would typically expect to never go on chain are starting to kind of look over the fence and be like, damn, like you can get pretty legit interest rates and terms. And I think that we want to introduce this to our customers. On the security side, I think we're taking two approaches. One, hardcore research, cryptography side, sexy. But then also getting like institutional level insurance on the bridge. And if you can have both of those where you have the ZK roll up stuff and the BM magic and you can layer on like an institutional insurance, then I do think that you are very credibly competing, if not out competing, the things like CBBTC and WBTC and you know, qualified custodian btc. And what will actually happen here is in this kind of bitcoin back borrowing setup, right again, you have the vault people put USDC inside of it. It lends to all these different durations, Bitcoin back loans, you get the LP token, maybe that's yielding whatever say 8%. People will take that LP token and they will put it in a money market fund again like Morpho or Fluid or something. They will borrow against that at a variable interest rate and they will essentially run that, that, that, that loop. Okay? And so ultimately the, the borrowing costs of these loans, the more that you can run that loop, which is kind of like a classic securitization loop and carry trade in what we call in tradfi that will start to compress down the, the, the, the borrowing interest rates. Now how effectively you're able to, to do that loop and how much you're able to compress down these interest rates and run that loop is a byproduct of the, the underlying risk of the asset. Right? So if you have a very risky bitcoin collateral, then this LP token, somebody's like H, maybe we're willing to lend 60% LTV on that, which means you can only get maybe 1 1/2 x leverage loop. The interest rates are not going to compress as much. But if you have a more pristine version of Bitcoin which is like a ZK roll up style Bitcoin maybe possibly with insurance, then the LP or the receipt token, this kind of bitcoin collateralized loan obligation has by far the best risk profile, which means that it will be able to, to, to, to, to get the best terms, kind of the highest LTV at the lowest rates. People will run this loop. And so you're, you're, you're going to start to create this really beautiful flywheel where it's very profitable to run this loop for the dollar lenders and it's extremely low interest rates for the bitcoin backed borrowers.

A

I mean a lot of these words I feel very familiar with like pristine security, capital efficiency. Like we've kind of had like a microcosm of this, not even a microcosm. We've had this ecosystem in Ethereum land with ether as an asset, as collateral. And I think you could also probably point towards base and morpho on base and Coinbase CBBTC on base and be like, okay, maybe I take your argument that none of these things are as sound as Bitcoin because bitcoin is super, is the most sound money of all time. But nonetheless you would still expect to see some form of this manifest Both on Ethereum layer one DeFi and on, you know, CBTC on Morpho on base have we seen anything close, any indication that like, we're on, we have an early stage, like demo of what you're talking about?

B

Well, not really, because this is net new. It's never been able to be created before. And it's primarily because of morpho midnight, right? Virtually all of D5 right now it's variable interest rate loans, right? So I put in dollars, I earn the AAVE rate of maybe 4%. Okay. And if you want higher yield, you're lending against shittier collateral. Okay. Riskier collateral. Once you have morpho midnight and you can add duration, right now you're able to increase the interest rate not by lending against shittier collateral, but by doing longer duration. So you're going to start to see these vaults in morpho that are not just at the money market rate of AAVE at 4% and it's variable interest rate, you're going to be able to see higher yields without adding risk of crappier collateral. And that's really the core component because if we think about it right now, the past five years, this idea that I'm talking about where you put dollars into defi. Like a, or something, and you get an LP token, you get the, the AUSDT, right? Well, that thing earns, you know, whatever, 4% the AAVE rate. Like, what are you going to do with that? It's earning you 4%. Are you going to post it as collateral and borrow again at another 4%? Like there's, there's no carry trade to really kind of capture there. So, so the morpho midnight, Morpho both v1, which allows you to isolate collateral only to something like Bitcoin or Ethereum, and then morpho midnight, which allows you to add the duration. Those are two major unlocks.

A

Okay. And the duration, when we talk about different durations in terms of loans now starting to now it feels like just rhymes with treasuries from treasury yields. And that's the kind of the same structure that we're trying to build here, right?

B

Exactly. I mean, there will be kind of a yield curve that starts to form where it's like maybe 4% to borrow, variable, maybe 4 and a half percent to borrow three months, etc. Etc. And there will kind of be a vicious competition that is kind of already ensuing right now from vault curators. There's all these teams entering the vault curation space. And my intuition here is that there's going to be a vicious competition to create the best mix or combination of pristine collateral. Is it 60% in variable interest rate and you know, some amount in this interest rate or sorry this duration or is it like, you know, how are you going to mix and match your vault to create again this like idyllic in defi. We'd call it the LP token and TradFi, we'd call it the pristine collateral. It's like what is the best vault combination to create the ultimate pristine collateral? Because if we go back to the repo market and the euro dollar system, that is the exorbitant privilege. If your collateral is seen as the pristine collateral then you win everything. All right.

A

And you are capital.

B

Yes. Because everybody says I don't give a, you know, like all of these shadow banks and stuff, they will start holding that pristine collateral or that LP token. Not because they're like I'm so aligned with Bitcoin or Ethereum, but they're like this is just the best risk adjusted collateral it allows me to leverage.

A

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if I'm a bitcoin holder, I get yield. Correct.

B

If you're a bitcoin holder, you're primarily getting the best bitcoin backed borrowing rates and terms possible. So it primarily appeals first and foremost to the borrowers, the bitcoin holders that want to borrow into bitcoin. You could build bitcoin yield products off of that, which I can describe if you'd like.

A

Yeah, yeah. So I would imagine that. Well, because there's arbitrage here across the different term lengths, the way that you access that arbitrage is having bitcoin as collateral and then that unlocks the capital needed to do the arbitrage. That's of like my intuition here.

B

Bingo. It's just a classic carry trade. Borrow against bitcoin at variable, relend it.

A

Somebody's going to build a vault that's like somebody deposit your bitcoin in here and then I will optimize the carry trade and then your, the yield's not going to be too high, it's going to be a dollar denominated yield of like, I don't know, 1 to 3%, 1 to 4%. Yeah, I think like it's free.

B

Well it, it, it's not non levered would probably be in that 1 to 3% range. But if you want to leverage it, right, because you borrow dollars against your bitcoin, you relend it into the higher duration vault. You get that LP token, you could borrow against that and loop it. So if you want to take leverage, you could, and I'm not advising this but Like I, I would argue it's, it's pretty safe. Somebody will. It's. Yeah, it, it, it, it's actually pretty safe leverage because in order for it to break the LP token right has to essentially break peg below $1. Which would mean that the underlying Bitcoin backed loans are essentially took on bad debt. They became under collateralized the amount of times Bitcoin backed loans have taken on bad debt and defi and the major protocols like AAVE and Morpho zero. So it's not risk free but like it's the best option we have.

A

Okay, but once again, so if we have Morpho midnight which is unlocked and available, aren't we going to see this happen with Ether first? Like why wouldn't this also happen with Ether and the fact that it's al. It's also already available to only Ethereum layer 1. Then why, why won't we see this happen with Ether first?

B

A lot of this is right on the bleeding edge. So I, I do think some of this, you know, Morpho midnight is live on, on Ethereum. It's kind of doing like a, a, a phased rollout. And so I think you will see it on Ethereum network first. You're not going to see it with either the asset first because you know, Morpho, Morpho crushes it with, with cbbtc like you know like they do.

A

They crush it with CBTC on base. Okay, not necessarily on the Ethereum layer one. Ethereum layer one ETH is still king.

B

Okay, fair enough. Regardless, I think Morpho is first and foremost only going out with CBBTC on base. So I'll correct myself that it's not necessarily Ethereum the network, which is kind of funny that you would call base, not the Ethereum network. Anyways.

A

Yeah, these are all separate chains.

B

Yes, yes, yes. Anyways, I do think, I do think this stuff you'll start to see from our perspective. It's like my personal background, I used to own a private money fund and I sold it back in 2021. So I'm very familiar with these ideas of how to lower borrowing costs while increasing profitability for lenders and increasing duration. Like this is my, this is my, my game. And, and so like it's an idea that we are pursuing hard. Now will other people like cbbtc? Will they just be like, look, that's a good idea but like we're just going to focus on just like classic fixed maturity Bitcoin backed loans with CBBTC first before we get into These like securitization loops, it's possible and if that's the case, like they're lost, you know, if they want to come and take it from us.

A

Okay, but, but you would want to see this emerge elsewhere because there's no reason why it can only other than what you were talking about earlier with like having, you know, morpho midnight on a bitcoin ZK layer two with, you know, the most pristine version of bitcoin as collateral, you're going to unlock more capital efficiency and better risk terms. I understand that, but still, you would want to see this still being built elsewhere just to prove out the thesis that this is actually going to work.

B

Yeah, I think that, that that's fair. I'm obviously biased by my own team and the project that we work on, but it would be incredible validation for me to kind of see this idea proliferate, you know, elsewhere with things like CBBTC and, and yeah, I mean, I would love to see it elsewhere.

A

Okay, so say this, this does start to emerge. What's the timeline for this newest innovation? Are you guys building this garbled circuits, which is bit VM4 or whatever, you

B

know, for us at Alpen Labs, you know, we'll probably be live on Mainnet in fall or, you know, soon tm and you know, I think we typically haven't really been much of a hype team or an announcement team, but you know, behind the scenes a lot of this stuff has kind of been getting built out. I do think that these, you know, I don't think I know that these kind of teams that I'm mentioning are keen to kind of be involved and take a bet on a bitcoin ecosystem. And the reality is a lot of, there's a long list of graveyard of Bitcoin L2s that have failed. And I think some of that relates to the technology. Like it just, it wasn't as good as this kind of garbled circuit tile approach. The trust assumptions weren't as good and frankly, just none of the other Bitcoin L2s, they didn't close. The big fish is really what it came down to.

A

What does that mean?

B

Meaning that, you know, if you try to build a layer two, like you have to go out and compete for, you know, the applications for the protocols. You know, teams like circle and tether and morpho and fluid and all of these kind of tier one DeFi teams. You can't just snap your fingers and they come on and deploy. It's, it's kind of a brutal BD process. Sure. And I think for us at Alpin, again, I'm kind of talking my own book. Like, very early on, we said either we're able to attract the best and compete for the top, or we just have to wrap up shop and say, you know, we gave it. We gave it a good fight. And I still am kind of of that opinion. Like, if we want bitcoin to win, we have to have the best teams, we have to have the best technology, and we have to have the best teams. And we can't just rely on this narrative of, you know, we are bitcoin, you know, come use us because of bitcoin, whatever the hell that means.

A

Who is your competition then? Who are the other Alpin Labs out there?

B

A lot of them have been struggling or dying. You know, like. Like a team that. That, you know, I liked our, you know, the Botanics guys, they just, you know, wound down Chop. Granted, it was a centralized kind of like a trusted multi sig, essentially, but, like, they wound down. I think a lot of other people compare us with a team called Citra, which is kind of live, and they. They use, like, a bit VM2 style bridge. I think people can just look at the block explorer like, it's probably not getting much activity at all. I think our real competition, honestly, is Base and Ark and Tempo Stablecoin chains.

A

Why those chains?

B

I mean, if they have a wrapped version of bitcoin, Ark is coming out with, I think. Am I leaking something here?

A

Circle has tokenized bitcoin that they just announced. Yeah. They're doing it on Ethereum and arc.

B

Yeah. And I think we have to break out of this kind of, like, competition for Bitcoin L2s. It's like, no disrespect, none of the other Bitcoin L2s are competing. And like I said, if you want to take a shot, you have to go for the top. And that top just does not have other Bitcoin L2s in it right now.

A

Okay, so fall Q3, Q4 this year is when the gates to the Alpin L2 open up tentatively. Is that right?

B

Yes.

A

And then you are trying to build this, like, bitcoin interest rate curve as soon as possible.

B

Yes.

A

Who will that attract? What capital will that attract? So, like, say. Say you do it, you do it successfully. It starts. You know, it's primitive, but the curve starts to build and, you know, the. The economy starts to grow. Who is, like, your first customer or first, like, entity to go knock on the door? Of, I mean, like, look, look what, look at the economy that we've produced. Don't you now want to like buy Bitcoin and take a part of it, take a part in it?

B

I think if you look at the model that Morpho laid out with Coinbase, Coinbase was essentially a kingmaker for them. And I think we would take a similar approach of going after partners that have existing distribution and offering what we feel is the most competitive bitcoin backed borrowing product and bitcoin yield product, kind of using some of the carry trade that we talked about. Because if you look in bitcoin land right now, bitcoin back borrowing actually has tons of demand and there's lots of demand for people who want to pay these fixed maturity, kind of longer duration loans. And typically it's around like 10%. It's starting to compress down a little bit. But even that, it's like, you know, it's, it's, it's maybe 9.9% and there's like origination fees for it. So there's pretty substantial market and room there to come in and disrupt with a much better product. But it can't just be on the technical purity. That's just like a bonus point. It has to be on the actual economics. Like we have to come in and say, you know, we can offer lower interest rates, you know, and you know, better borrowing terms and longer durations. And that gets back into the whole conversation. I talked about where we started with repo into how this Bitcoin C lo idea will work. That's all kind of part of this vision.

D

Hey, Bankless nation, It's David. If you're hearing this, that's because you are listening to the free Bankless podcast feed. Did you know that there is a premium Bankless RSS feed? The premium feed has extra interviews that I do for my own personal research and just deeper questions that I want answered about the crypto industry. Questions that I want to answer so I can be more informed as an investor both at Bankless Ventures and also just in my own personal portfolio too. Also, there are no ads, which means if you listen to the premium feed instead of the free feed, you'll get about 20 hours of your life back every year because you choose to support Bankless directly. So if you're interested in getting extra content all while skipping the ads, or you just appreciate what we do here and want us to keep doing it, we'd appreciate it if you signed up for Bankless Premium and there is a link in the show notes to get started. Cheers to a good 2026.

A

Isn't sailor kind of doing this in like a parallel hacky, centralized corporate way? Like isn't that what like stretch is like it's offering, it's a variable interest rate product and you know, bitcoin is the collateral in quotes. And then you get like isn't, isn't Sailor kind of doing something is parallel in spirit to what you are trying to do in a very like cypher punk purest way.

B

Totally. Yeah. I actually have a whiteboard video that, that I made where I compared what I call this bitcoin C low concept to strc. But you're exactly right. People have dollars, they want fixed income. Maybe they care about bitcoin, maybe they, they don't. And the proposition is you can either give your dollars to Sailor and you get this thing called the perpetual preferred Stretch. He's going to use that to buy bitcoin on his balance sheet. You are backed not actually, but kind of by Sailor's balance sheet or you are a dollar holder and you say I want to give my dollars into a vault that essentially is lending that on these over collateralized bitcoin back loans. So it's like you either want to give your dollars to Saylor and you're quasi backed by his balance sheet or do you want to give your dollars on chain and you are provably kind of backed by these, these bitcoin collateralized loans. In Saylor's case he issues his instrument is strc. In our case, our instrument is this bitcoin clo. Now I also had a separate whiteboard video where I kind of explained why I think STRC would, would break peg. And it's exactly what happened that people with these fixed income instruments like Stretch that maybe want to earn 10, they're going to say I'm going to put that on chain, I'm going to borrow against that at 4% and run that looping strategy. But when that trade needs to unwind, there becomes massive sell pressure on STRC and it starts to break peg, which is where it's now at like you know, 85 cents on the dollar. A bitcoin clos has way, way, way more resilience in my opinion to, to maintain stability there and therefore you'll be able to kind of again like run that, that loop or that securitization loop far more effectively. And so in my opinion there is this battle for like what Sailor calls digital credit or it could be bitcoin backed credit. And I think there is a credible case to be made that onchain is a far superior way to do this than perpetual preferreds.

A

Yeah, yeah, I definitely am curious about the perpetual preferreds, especially because it's not just Sailor, it's also Strive and SATA. And so the fact that there's like multiple entities doing this strategy kind of tells me that hey, maybe there's a there there and this isn't just like one. One man fueled by a dream to like build this like bitcoin is digital credit thing. And so I, I'm like open to the idea that you know, some somehow btc the asset needs to elevate, can elevate, ascend itself from being digital gold, which I think is constraining on the cap of Bitcoin and can ascend to digital credit. I really like the idea of bitcoin as digital credit as like the next step function change for bitcoin as an asset. Bitcoin, the narrative. I look at Saylor and I look at like the centralized company model and be like, fuck, is it really a centralized company that does this? To some degree, he's doing it. Despite STRC being in somewhat of predicament nonetheless, like Bitcoin is way higher than when Saylor got started in the first place. But I do like bitcoin as digital credit as the better meme for Bitcoin and I see that being born out here as well.

B

Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. I mean you can hold two multiple narratives in your head at once. Like Bitcoin can be this money in this currency and you know, we are building, you know, things that will allow that maybe people want to have private payments with, with Bitcoin in a non sovereign, you know, form of money. But you can also kind of build this parallel path of you know, these kind of bitcoin backed credit instruments or digital credit on chain without like the counterparty risk of sailor. And that is one very viable use case of, of Bitcoin as, as the lowest counterparty, you know, collateral out there. And if we go back again to like mortgage backed securities, like those were perceived as very low counterparty risk collateral. People are saying I'm willing to lend my dollars into real estate because there's very low counterparty risk there or it's pristine, it's very strong collateral. And then people said, well the US government is the ultimate, you know, form like, like counterparty with the lowest risk. So we'll lend our dollars there to mint the treasuries. And I think this is really the role that bitcoin can play if it's not currency, it's the lowest counterparty risk out there, which is why people are willing to lend these dollars into it to create these forms of bitcoin backed credit.

A

So Morpho Midnight did launch today or sometime very recently or very soon. I'm looking at the launch document and a little Q and A. So the race to build this bitcoin backed repo market that you've been discussing starts. It has started, has started basically this week or today. And so like aren't you behind?

B

Depends if we haven't been doing any, like we're today.

A

Okay, all right, what are you watching? What are you looking for? What are you watching right now in order to like see this market grow?

B

Like I'm very open sharing a lot of this because again I'm just like look, if somebody wants to try to do it better than us, like bring it on. Like, like we are behind in terms of the network effect of like kind of the Ethereum network and liquidity. But I do think that we have a very compelling case that, that we have a superior form of bitcoin. Not just on the cryptographic side, but you know, again, maybe, maybe insurance is going to exist and, and I do think that we can out compete there. In reality, Morpho just launched. It's going to be this phased launch rollout. Like there's still so many aspects of this, like fixed maturity loans that like haven't even existed yet. And I think a lot of the, the vault curators are still kind of dipping their feet in and they're just kind of being like, look, let's just make sure we still know how to like bring dollars into the Morpho v2 vaults and then even lend them into fixed maturities. Like and the maturities are going to start off small, like you know, a month or two is my intuition. And like it's not just going to be this hit the ground running today and like Boom, we have 12 month Bitcoin back loans and oh my God, we have like a bitcoin clos. Like I think, I think some of that is going to take time to build out. And I think there's very few people that have kind of thought, thought through it. Like in my opinion this is like pretty, pretty fresh stuff.

A

What's the name for the L2, the Bitcoin L2 that you guys are building? Do you guys just call it the Alpin ZK L2? What do you call it?

B

Our EBM will be called just Alpine EVM underneath that. We haven't really announced this, but this layer that I kind of compared to Celestia ZK accounts will be called Strata and that's would be kind of more just like an open, you know, bridge standard where it's like look, anybody else can kind of plug into this.

A

Okay, so the Alpin evm, are you guys trying to like open this up and have it be a open developer ecosystem similar to Ethereum or base or the layer twos or are you just like. No, we're actually very opinionated about what we want this to do. We wanted to do the morpho bitcoin backed loans, we wanted to have fluid on there, but it's all as a means to an end of producing this bitcoin repo market. And we don't really care about open an open developer ecosystem. Where between these two things, where do you lie?

B

I think we're much more opinionated. I mean like the core ethos is it's open, it's permissionless, like hell, come on, do whatever the heck you want. But I think to some people's chagrin it's like we get hit up for grants and like hackathons and it's like, no, I mean, I mean it just. The truth is it's like where do we compete on that? Like are we, are we going to be able to compete with like Mega Eth for rwas? Like no, like our competitive differentiator is bitcoin. We kind of already see the use cases in the team that we want and like we voraciously pursued those in pursuit of our, our vision. And so if anybody wants to build the open developer ecosystem, like that's great. But you know, we're kind of in this to win it and you need to be hyper focused on building the exact stack that you think is the best.

A

I do kind of think that that's actually how Ethereum as a side quest here, how Ethereum should actually brand its layer one. Like no, the Ethereum layer one is an app chain for Ether the asset. It's the pristine collateral on the Ethereum layer 1. All applications should serve Ether the asset. And I think that would actually behoove the value of Ether the asset far more than like world computer open developer ecosystem. Come build anything you want on Ethereum.

B

It's interesting. I don't know, I mean, I know why you say that because it kind of leads into some of the reasons why maybe you left Ether the asset and what you would like to see from the community and like, what's good for number go up, But I probably don't have super strong opinions on that. Like, I would agree with you if. If I cared significantly about the Ethereum ETH price, but in some ways, like, ETH has branded itself as this kind of, like, little bit of the experimental type thing. Like, I'm. I'm not sure if it can easily pivot to being like, here's our roadmap. We're gonna be hyper opinionated about it, right?

A

Yeah, I think it's less about being hyper opinionated and it's more about like, what is Ethereum for? Ethereum is for ether ether the asset. And it's more of just like a meme and narrative in comms thing. But again, that's a side quest. David, if people are piqued about what you guys are building at Alpin, they want to learn more. Maybe they want to come and build on your open developer ecosystem. Where should they go to learn more about Alpen?

B

In a couple of weeks, we'll kind of be putting out some new material, so maybe hold till then. But you can go to Alpen Labs IO and you can check us out on Twitter. You can follow me. David Siroy. S E R O Y and yeah, keep an eye out.

A

Thanks for coming on the show.

B

All right. Thanks, brother.

A

Paying attention. You guys know what to do. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in, but this is the frontier. We're headed west. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey.

B

Thanks a lot, Sam.