Hong Kong — Layer 2 Bitcoin builders argued Thursday that the next phase of crypto’s evolution will not be about replacing bitcoin with “digital gold” but about making it productive.
Speaking at Consensus Hong Kong 2026, executives from Citrea, Rootstock Labs and investment firm BlockSpaceForce argued that Bitcoin’s scaling layers are less about raw throughput and more about transforming the world’s largest cryptocurrency into a programmable financial base layer.
“The bottom line – the mission – is just to make Bitcoin a productive asset,” said Gabe Parker, head of business development at Citrea, a zk-rollup built on Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s base layer, he noted, was never designed for expressive smart contracts. “It’s about introducing existing narratives like DeFi, lending, borrowing and adding that stack to Bitcoin… It’s more of a programmability feature than scaling.”
Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar, CEO of Rootstock Labs, pointed out that the industry’s obsession with the term “layer two” misses the point.
“The first layer is a store of value. The second layer is an economic coordination layer…and the third layer is a scaling layer that enables payments,” Gutierrez Zaldivar said. “We should start talking about networks that constitute levels of economic coordination. »
Panelists highlighted the growing institutional demand for bitcoin-backed lending and yield strategies. “Bitcoin has become a macro-financial asset that everyone wants to hold,” said Charles Chong of BlockSpaceForce. “The next step is to build a financial system around this. »
But the assumptions of trust remain at the heart of the debate. Citrea’s Parker criticized the reliance on centralized custodians behind Bitcoin products packaged on Ethereum. “If you look at what secures wrapped bitcoin, it’s just a multisig of three to five,” he said. “This model is not scalable. If you want to manage hundreds of billions or trillions, you need protocol-based assumptions, not counterparty-based assumptions.”
However, institutions remain cautious. “On the one hand, they can work with regulated counterparties and have legal recourse centrally,” said BlockSpaceForce’s Chong. “Or they can deploy BTCFi without permission, but in that case you’re trusting the governance of the protocol and taking on the risk of the smart contracts. I think with that in mind, many institutions are actually going to choose the old solution today, at its current stage.”
Gutierrez Zaldivar of Rootstock Labs argued that hybrid compliance models could bridge this gap in the interim, but stressed that the long-term vision goes further.
“For Bitcoin to become relevant to the world, it is not enough to be a store of value,” he said.
For proponents of Bitcoin scaling, the bet is that even a small portion of Bitcoin flowing into decentralized finance could reshape both the network and global markets in the years to come.
Read more: As DATs Face Pressure, Institutions May Soon Look to BTCFi for Their Next Strategic Move
