By Yumi Chung
Traditional financial institutions' investment in cryptocurrencies is a gradual process.
"We have reason to believe that in the next five to ten years, the Bitcoin DeFi system will create more than $1 trillion in value." This is the view mentioned by Franklin Templeton trading analyst in a Coindesk column. The agency's attention to Bitcoin and L2 ecology has prompted it to increase research and capital investment in this field.
In a recent Fortune report,Bitcoin L2 project Bitlayer announced the completion of its latest round of financing . In its list of institutions, we saw Franklin Templeton, which participated in Bitlayer's Series A financing as a co-lead investor. Regarding this move, Kevin Farrelly, managing partner of Franklin Templeton, said: "We believe that Bitlayer's uniqueness and technology have the potential to unlock new use cases and opportunities for Bitcoin, and we look forward to exploring cooperation opportunities with the Bitlayer team and our other products focused on Bitcoin finance. This investment emphasizes our commitment to supporting innovation in the field of digital assets."
Franklin is one of the issuers of ETFs in the United States. The disclosure of this financing information inevitably makes people curious. How did Bitlayer get the lead investment from this old Wall Street institution? What are its highlights and what airdrop opportunities are there? We have sorted out and summarized key information such as Bitlayer's technological innovation, financing map, team background, ecological data and airdrop tutorials for readers' reference.
Project Description
Bitlayer is the first Bitcoin security equivalent Layer 2 based on BitVM. The core goal of Bitlayer is to solve the trade-off between Bitcoin Layer 2 security and Turing completeness through cryptographic innovation and blockchain engineering implementation. The project is committed to becoming the computing layer of Bitcoin, aiming to introduce hyper-scalability to Bitcoin while inheriting its security and providing users with a high-throughput, low-cost transaction experience.
Technological innovation
Bitlayer proposed a second-layer solution for Bitcoin based on BitVM. The project uses layered virtual machine technology (Layered Virtual Machine) and uses zero-knowledge proof (zkp) and optimistic verification (op) mechanisms to support various types of calculations. In addition, Bitlayer also builds a dual-channel two-way locked asset bridge through OP-DLC and BitVM bridge, thereby achieving the same security as Bitcoin's first layer.
The Bitlayer technical whitepaper can be viewed at the following link: https://static.bitlayer.org/Bitlayer-Technical-Whitepaper.pdf
Bitlayer Architecture
Financing History and Institutional Landscape
As of July 2024, Bitlayer has completed two rounds of financing, seed round and Series A round, with a total financing amount of US$16 million.
On July 23, Bitlayer completed $11 million in its latest Series A financing round, with top institutions Franklin Templeton and ABCDE Capital co-leading the investment. In addition, institutions including Stake Capital Group, WAGMI Ventures, Skyland Ventures, Flow Traders, GSR Ventures, FalconX, Metalpha, 280 Capital, Presto Labs and Caladan, as well as BRC20 founder DOMO and FactBlock KBW co-founder Brian Kang also participated in this round of financing.
Earlier on March 27, Bitlayer announced the completion of a $5 million seed round of financing led by Framework Ventures and ABCDE. Other participating institutions included StarkWare, OKX Ventures, Alliance DAO, UTXO Management, Asymmetric Capital, Kenetic Capital, Pivot Global, Web3Port, Mindfulness Capital, C6E Capital, PAKA, Comma3 Capital and Kronos Ventures, as well as top Web3 entrepreneurs and angel investors such as the famous Bitcoin OG&KOL Dan Held, Messari CEO Ryan Selkis and co-founder Dan McArdle.
Team Background
According to Rootdata, Bitlayer has two core founding members, Kevin He and Charlie Hu.
Kevin He: Co-founder, former YouChain chief architect, former Huobi senior technical director, former VP of New Fire Technology. Kevin has launched 3 EVM-chains, 2 ZK-Rollups, and 1 non-custodial platform with billions of TVL.
Charlie Hu: Co-founder, early ecosystem builder and investor of Polkadot, head of business development for Polygon China, with developer relationship resources for blockchain application projects in more than 20 countries around the world.
Project key data
Since the launch of Mainnet-V1, Bitlayer has been actively launching a number of marketing activities to incentivize ecosystem construction, including launching the developer incentive airdrop plan Ready Player One, launching the Dapp list competition, launching the first Bitlayer First Mining Festival event, and launching the Bitlayer First Mining Festival S2 event on OKX Cryptopedia, etc., which attracted the participation of many crypto communities and users.
Judging from the data, Bitlayer is ahead of other projects in the same field in terms of industry participation and community activity. The following are some key data:
TVL: According to the information disclosed on the official website, the total locked assets on the Bitlayer chain are currently worth about $580M, far exceeding other Bitcoin L2s
Social media users: Total users: about 700K, of which Twitter users: over 522K, TG users: over 46K, Discord users: over 130K
Monthly active users on the chain: 1M+
Number of ecological project deployments: 200+
Ecological landscape
From the ecological panorama released by Bitlayer, we can see that although the Bitlayer ecosystem is still in a relatively early stage, it shows a trend of vigorous development.
The team has stated that there are currently hundreds of projects being built in the Bitlayer ecosystem, covering infrastructure and developer tools, wallets, DeFi, NFT, games and metaverse, as well as RWA and many other sections, including infrastructure projects such as Ankr, Polyhedra Network, Meson, Apro, imToken, and leading ecological applications such as Bitsmiley, Avalon Finance, bitCow, Lorenzo, Pell, Bitparty, Enzo and Marcaron.
For specific project chain data, please refer to the following link: https://www.bitlayer.org/ready-player-one/leaderboard
Potential airdrop opportunities and tutorials
Currently, Bitlayer has not issued any tokens and cannot be purchased or traded on exchanges, but the team has announced the design of airdrop-related mechanisms such as gems and points, and has clearly given $BTR rewards in the OKX Cryptopedia event. Therefore, it can be confirmed that the project has a clear token incentive plan for early users.
After sorting out, we found that Bitlayer gems have been distributed to the project owners in the first Dapp ranking competition, and the project owners and the Bitlayer team will jointly distribute 100% to active users. Currently, users can enter the Bitlayer user center page to receive gem rewards. According to community estimates, the expected return is 0.0025U/gem.
Other users who want to participate in the Bitlayer ecosystem to obtain future airdrops can accumulate Bitlayer points by actively participating in Bitlayer construction, whether it is market activities or on-chain interactions, and even directly obtain $BTR airdrops through certain activities!
The specific method is as follows:
1. Log in to Bitlayer Racer Center and explore the points upgrade racer
On July 22, Bitlayer has launched the user center page, which supports users to log in to the user center page. After linking their personal wallet, they can view the number of Bitlayer gem airdrops they have received, obtain the accumulated points rewards from past interactions, and receive medals of honor for past Bitlayer activities.
Currently, Bitlayer's points system has three sections: novice tasks, advanced tasks, and daily tasks. According to the number of points, the user's user racer has six levels. In the future, the team will allocate $BTR airdrops based on the user's level and the number of Bitlayer points.
The main tasks for beginners are to familiarize themselves with the Bitlayer score panel, Twitter interaction, BTC cross-chain and transfer tasks. After completing all of them, you can get 8,100 points.
Advanced tasks require completing a certain number of ladder-type tasks and reaching specific milestones. For example, completing cross-chain assets and reaching a certain number of transactions will earn you up to 250,000 points.
Daily tasks are refreshed every day. You can get 2,000 points by completing all tasks in this section every day.
2. Bitlayer First Mining Festival Phase 2 Event
Currently, the second phase of the First Mining Festival is still ongoing, and the latest deadline for the event is September 14 (the event entrance is: https://www.okx.com/zh-hans/web3/discover/cryptopedia/event/37 ).
Prior to this, users can log in to the OKX Cryptopedia event page and complete the tasks set by Bitlayer and six ecological projects including GamerBoom, Macaron, Anome, Vanilla Finance, Avalon Finance and Zearn. Users who complete the verification will not only have the opportunity to participate in the $BTR airdrop reward with a total value of US$1.25 million and 100 million Bitlayer points rewards, but also have the opportunity to obtain exclusive rewards provided by each project, including:
Gamerboom offers 150 million $CAPY token rewards, and 5 million $CAPY token rewards for users who complete social tasks
Macaron offers $200,000 worth of DeFi credits
Anome offers 1% of total token rewards, worth more than $1 million
Vanilla Finance offers 50 million Vanilla points
Avalon Finance provides each participant with 5,000 Avalon points and 2x Avalon points acceleration benefits
Zearn provides users with over 40 million $ZEA token rewards
According to actual calculations, the on-chain interaction loss of completing these tasks is only about $5. According to the data shown in OKX Cryptopedia, the event has attracted 233.6K participants, but most users only participated in the simplest social media task, and the corresponding reward for completing the task is $50,000 worth of $BTR. In contrast, the task rewards of the other 7 projects are at least worth $150,000, and the number of participants in these tasks is only about 50K.
Since most of the Bitlayer ecosystem projects are still in the early stages, if you complete the tasks of the Phase 2 event of the First Mining Festival, on the one hand, you will have the opportunity to obtain event-exclusive rewards, on the other hand, you can also accumulate Bitlayer points, and there is a high probability that you will even be able to obtain future token airdrops of these ecosystem projects, achieving the goal of killing two birds with one stone.
risk warning
1. Bitlayer has not yet announced the token economics, and the exchange ratio of gems, points and $BTR has not yet been announced, so you need to continue to pay attention to the official disclosure information.
2. Currently, the threshold for accumulating points for novices is extremely low, and participation with multiple accounts requires consideration of witch risks.
Official channels
Bitlayer official website: https://www.bitlayer.org/
Bitlayer Twitter: https://x.com/BitlayerLabs
Bitlayer Medium: https://medium.com/@Bitlayer
Bitlayer Github: https://github.com/bitlayer-org
