Would you borrow or lend assets on platforms like AAVE if it was on a Bitcoin settlement layer?
Would you purchase blue chip NFTs that would emerge on there?
Would you provide liquidity for say BTC/USDC pair on an AMM DEX (i.e. Uniswap) ?
Be brutally honest.
All of these kinds of DeFi projects have already existed in the Bitcoin ecosystem for years. They’re built around smart Bitcoin (RBTC) as the base asset and run on the
Rootstock sidechain. There’s
collateralized lending,
NFTs,
AMM DEXs, and even a solid decentralized stablecoin
Dollar-on-Chain. But the fact that all of this has been around for years without mass adoption proves that there is no real demand for it among Bitcoin users.
Personally, I might use decentralized stablecoins (for example, something like
BTCD - Bitcoin Dollar) if there were a way to spend them in everyday stores, similar to how people can currently pay with USDC via dedicated payment cards. And if such a stablecoin actually evolved into a widely accepted means of payment, then lending services (borrowing against BTC collateral) and decentralized exchanges could become genuinely useful as well.
As for NFTs, I would definitely use them when they’re applied to real-world use cases like digital access passes - hotel room keys, flight tickets, and so on. I don’t really care which blockchain they run on, as long as it’s not a corporate-controlled one managed by a limited group of entities. The reason I’m not using NFTs now isn’t because they’re not on Bitcoin - it’s because hardly anyone is offering practical implementations of these solutions yet.