What is BOB (Build on Bitcoin)? A Complete Guide to the Hybrid Bitcoin Layer 2

Key Takeaways

• BOB is a new Layer-2 hybrid blockchain which combines the best features of Bitcoin and Ethereum within one Bitcoin DeFi platform.
• It uses BitVM technology to achieve the security of Bitcoin and create trustless bridges to connect BOB, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other Layer 1 blockchains.
• In April 2024, shortly after the Bitcoin halving event, BOB launched its mainnet and became the first hybrid Layer-2 in the Superchain ecosystem.
• BOB has received investments from Coinbase Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, and Ledger with the total amount of $23.7 million in seed, strategic, and public rounds.
• The native token of BOB was launched in November 2025 with the hard cap of 10 billion tokens used for security, governance, and protocol of the platform.
• The notable milestones of the project include Native Bitcoin Vaults Stack, BitVM Bridge being prepared to launch its mainnet, and Native Bitcoin Swaps supported by BOB Gateway.

More than anything else Bitcoin is famous for its security. The feature which it has never had before is the versatility of Ethereum in the sphere of decentralized finance. Exactly that issue has been resolved with the creation of BOB (Build on Bitcoin). Instead of choosing between the proof-of-work security of Bitcoin and programmability of Ethereum, BOB tries to combine the two. If you wonder what is the future of Bitcoin DeFi in 2026, BOB can definitely be considered.

In this guide we will learn about BOB (Build on Bitcoin), how it works, its funding, native token, and products.

What Is BOB (Build on Bitcoin)?

BOB stands for Build on Bitcoin and is a Hybrid Layer-2 protocol that merges the security and capital from Bitcoin with the DeFi innovation and flexibility of Ethereum. In essence, the concept of the project is simple, although the implementation itself may be quite complicated.

Bitcoin stores billions of dollars worth of value, yet much of this value is not used due to the fact that Bitcoin base layer is incompatible with smart contracts. BOB aims to make use of the dormant capital and to position BTC as the backbone of a new decentralized finance system.

BOB is referred to as a hybrid Layer 2 solution, and in this case, there’s much in just one single word. BOB is a part of the Superchain ecosystem and employs OP Stack protocol for Ethereum rollup.

Moreover, it acts as a Bitcoin secured blockchain through its association with Babylon for Bitcoin finality. Simply put, BOB utilizes Ethereum rollup structure to implement smart contracts and then depends on proof of work finality from Bitcoin.

How the Hybrid Layer 2 Model Works

Bitcoin Security Meets Ethereum Flexibility

By merging Bitcoin security with Ethereum flexibility, BOB aims to solve the issues of growth of Bitcoin that existed for years, including limited smart contract functionality and poor interoperability with other blockchains. Instead of forcing developers to leave Bitcoin network and users to trust some other chain, BOB tries to provide both of them with what they already wanted. Developers get EVM compatibility. Users get a chance to enter into DeFi through the network that they already trust.

BitVM and Trust-Minimized Bridging

Another crucial element of BOB’s architecture is BitVM. BOB uses BitVM technology to gain the security of Bitcoin and create trust-minimized bridges between BOB, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and any other Layer 1 blockchain.

This is especially relevant because bridges between Bitcoin and any other chain have always had custodians or wrapped tokens. Because the Hybrid L2 needs such architecture, no third-party bridges will be required for interoperability, and thus, the liquidity will be centralized on Bitcoin instead of being distributed across multiple blockchains.

Bitcoin Finality Through Staking

BOB utilizes the staking mechanism of Babylon to improve its security. Within this approach, nodes stake BTC within the Bitcoin blockchain for the purpose of validation of the BOB chain. With this approach, the security of the network is guaranteed, and with the use of BTC staking combined with BitVM, BTC access on BOB becomes trust-minimized.

According to one of the co-founders of the project, the long-term vision of BOB is even more ambitious. The next step is the transition of BOB to the Bitcoin proof-of-work security through Optimine, a merge mining protocol for securing the system.

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The Origin Story and Funding History

The emergence of BOB took place over a certain period. During its work with the technology stack, the project went through several rounds of funding.

Seed round

A total of $10 million worth of seed funding was secured for BOB in a seed round conducted by Castle Island Ventures, in conjunction with participation from Mechanism Ventures, Bankless Ventures, CMS Ventures, UTXO Management, as well as angels like Dan Held and Domo, the inventor of BRC-20 standard.

Strategic round

Several months later, BOB managed to raise an additional $1.6 million in a strategic fundraising round led by Ledger Cathay Fund, and financed by a group of angel investors including representatives from BlackRock, Rarible, Ordinals, Aave, Curve, Threshold, Magic Eden, Mechanism, Injective, Vessel Capital, Babylon, and Centrifuge.

Part of that money was allocated for the expansion of BOB. Out of all raised funds, $1 million was supposed to go towards a BOB incubator for startups focused on Bitcoin infrastructure and BOB-related projects.

Mainnet launch

Mainnet launch of BOB happened just several days after the halving of that year’s Bitcoin block rewards. That was considered a significant milestone in the development of Bitcoin Layer 2 solutions. Among other things, the early backers of BOB were UTXO, ViaBTC, AntAlpha, CMS Holdings, as well as some of the other venture firms listed above.

Superchain membership

In December 2024, BOB announced that the network joined Superchain, which stands for a dynamically growing collection of chains powered by the Optimism’s OP Stack and is therefore called the first hybrid Layer-2 in this ecosystem.

In addition, it stressed that some of its most distinguishing features include easy Bitcoin staking and advanced onboarding tools that facilitate BTC DeFi. The list of supporters of the project at this point already included such investment firms as Castle Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Mechanism Capital, and Bankless Ventures among others.

Token Generation Event

By the end of 2025, prior to the token’s launch, BOB had gained considerable on-chain traction. Before the token generation event, the hybrid Layer 2 network managed to accumulate $300+ million TVL, 1 million active wallets, and 545k unique users in 18 months after the mainnet launch.

In its turn, during the fundraising process, Build on Bitcoin managed to raise a total sum of $23.7 million.

The BOB Token

The native token of BOB was launched in November 2025 and served as a tool for governance and utility.

Supply and Distribution

The total fixed supply of 10 billion tokens is issued in BOB’s hybrid chain as an ERC-20 token. At the time of launch, the initial circulating supply comprised 22.20% of the total supply.

The allocation breaks down as follows:

Another one concerns token’s tokenomics, revealing the fact that most of the tokens become locked at the moment of token release. Tokenomics are said to lock 77.8% of tokens using 48 months unlocking periods in order to increase stability of the value accumulation process.

What the Token Is Used For

BOB token is not only speculative means. According to the project, it functions in different ways – security via the staking and delegation of Hybrid Nodes responsible for the finality of Bitcoin, BitVM bridge and Gateway solvers; governance by the voting on proposals or the delegation of the votes to influence the future of the network; and protocol utility that enables its owners to enjoy the privilege of accessing innovations and discounts.

Market Reception

Token release had quite a strong effect on the market. Being listed on Coinbase, BOB token experienced a price surge which reached 25% since the day of its release and resulted in $45M market capitalization. The trading of this token was rapidly available at numerous derivatives exchanges. HTX introduced perpetual futures contract for BOB/USDT.

The BOB Airdrop and Fusion Program

But BOB has been operating the Fusion rewards program even before the launch of its token. The rewards program aimed at building the community before the token launch. BOB Fusion has been an official points program of the project where users got rewarded with BOB Spice or points based on their on-chain activity on BOB mainnet through three seasons.

Season 1 lasted from March 27, 2024, to the BOB mainnet launch on May 1, 2024, reaching $300 million of total value locked within just 4 weeks, and season 2 lasted up to September 25, 2024, accumulating $135 million of TVL for over 153,000 users and over 60 projects.

The activity was directly related to the airdrop of the token. 415 million of tokens or 4.15% of the total token supply have been airdropped to reward early supporters. The airdrop involved core supporters (about 17,000 persons) and community members (200,000 people). Eligibility to the airdrop was based on the Spice harvest through Fusion Seasons 1 through 3, season 1 weighing 50% more than other seasons.

The snapshot of the eligible wallets for this airdrop took place on November 6, 2025, while airdrop could be claimed since November 20, 2025, on the official BOB claim page, with unclaimed tokens being returned to the ecosystem treasury after 45 days.

The eligibility criteria included the volume of harvested Spice, the number of transactions on BOB mainnet prior to the snapshot and the evaluation of the on-chain activity, all the wallet addresses being checked for money laundering and criminal activity prior to the token distribution.

This airdrop is already over, and the tokens are in circulation on the market. Thus, those studying BOB at present deal with the functioning token ecosystem rather than the community building stage.

Key Products and Features

BOB’s roadmap evolved from a mere hybrid chain into an ecosystem for Bitcoin DeFi infrastructure.

BOB Gateway and Native Bitcoin Swaps

BOB Gateway is one of the recent infrastructures introduced in BOB’s ecosystem. It was announced that BOB will introduce Native Bitcoin Swaps on its Gateway, which is an intents-based Bitcoin interoperability protocol, and the initial support will be provided for USDC, USDT, and ETH tokens in Ethereum and Base ecosystems, with further expansion to other blockchains and tokens.

At the early stage of development, BOB Gateway bridged native BTC with LayerZero’s wBTC.OFT protocol on 11 blockchains and allowed BTC deposits to many decentralized apps.

Native Bitcoin Vaults

One of the most important innovations introduced by BOB is making Bitcoin a collateral asset without transferring the custody to someone else. BOB announced the creation of Native Bitcoin Vaults Stack infrastructure, which is an open-source infrastructure that will allow using Bitcoin as collateral in decentralized finance without losing custody in the Bitcoin network and will be released at the beginning of 2026.

This was highlighted by the team itself in their year-end recap. The core point of these vaults is that it will provide users with the ability to use Bitcoin as collateral without giving up the custody of it, which is claimed by the team to be the first innovation of this kind in the history of DeFi, and the technology stack behind it will be open-source.

Moreover, along with that, BOB has been developing yield infrastructure for Bitcoin. It announced the introduction of a Hybrid BTC yield infrastructure, creating what can be considered as the first multi-chain BTC-yield layer and allowing users to deposit assets to managed vaults on BOB network and earn Bitcoin yield from other blockchains. The initial partners to launch with this product were Veda, Euler, Lombard, Gamma, Oku, and Hourglass.

The BitVM Bridge

The BitVM bridge plays a significant role in future BOB plans for Bitcoin transactions that are required to be trustless. The native BTC bridge, which uses BitVM technology, is designed to facilitate BTC transfers in a trustless and non-custodial manner without BTC wrapping and is currently being developed via tests on testnets with partners such as Anchorage and RockawayX, and will have a full-scale production launch in early 2026. Furthermore, improvements in terms of increasing efficiency of the bridge have been made by the engineering team.

The use of cut and choose scheme for BitVM3, which involves using Verifiable Secret Sharing Schemes and adaptor signatures has led to lowering on-chain transaction fees to about $10.91. As a result, the cost of BitVM3 on-chain operations has been reduced by 87%.

Improvement in engineering sphere allowed decreasing the on-chain costs of BitVM3 by 87% to approximately $11 per dispute and proves scalability and cheapness of operation of BitVM in 2026.

Institutional Integrations

BOB is also developing bridges for institutional finance. Custodian services offered by Anchorage Digital provide regulated on-ramps for institutional players to allocate their BTC in BOB’s ecosystem with TVL of around $250M.

Infrastructure of wallets has been also developed. Cobo, the digital asset custody company, has integrated MPC wallet with BOB and, therefore, increased the security and functionality of projects and institutions participating in the ecosystem.

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How to Store and Access BOB (Build on Bitcoin)

Nevertheless, BOB is an EVM network, and it supports all wallets working on Ethereum and other Layer 2 networks. Being a Bitcoin Layer 2 network with EVM compatibility, it can easily be added to MetaMask by inserting BOB’s Network ID and RPC data into MetaMask Custom Network or using ChainList that acts as an aggregator of all RPCs and Chain IDs, providing one-click access to BOB’s ecosystem.

There is a list of EVM compatible wallets on BOB’s official documentation, and according to BOB’s documentation, all EVM wallets will work on BOB with the help of “Add to Wallet” feature which automatically connects the wallet to the appropriate chain and registers the official BOB token contract.

Speaking about the transfer of assets between networks, BOB utilizes Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) to support bridge liquidity in BOB’s various deployments.

When manually adding BOB token, it is recommended to cross-check the token contract address in BOB’s documentation or a third-party website like CoinMarketCap because there are several tokens unrelated to BOB that share a similar name in the cryptocurrency space.

Recent Developments in 2026

The development of BOB did not stop in 2026. In a development update posted in March 2026, there are 234 merged pull requests in the network’s UI, Gateway, and SDK modules including live prototype of fixed rate, instant Bitcoin swaps and quote optimization to improve USDT and USDC rates.

Moreover, there are some development works that are under way regarding larger order sizes, limit orders, and privacy that are expected to be compliant with regulatory requirements. At about the same time, Jovian Hardfork was one of the most important crypto governance events.

The long-term goals of BOB have become clear as well. It became known how BOB will build upon the idea of becoming “the Bank of Bitcoin” – just like neobanks did with traditional banks, updating the bitcoin economy.

Why BOB Matters for Bitcoin DeFi

The Bitcoin DeFi sector has been rapidly expanding in recent months. As reported by an industry overview, the total TVL of the true Bitcoin DeFi sector has been rising from around $200 million to $8 billion in just 18 months.

BOB’s innovative approach, based on combining Bitcoin’s security and DeFi possibilities of Ethereum, has made it one of the most notable infrastructure projects trying to capitalize on it.

Instead of evolving Bitcoin in order to make it fit for new purposes, BOB creates a parallel execution layer which enables BTC holders to use lending, swaps, yield and collateralized borrowings with the same level of security as provided by Bitcoin.

From the point of view of common users, this can mean earning yield or using long-term BTC holdings as collateral for loans. From the perspective of developers, it provides the possibility of using the full benefits of the EVM ecosystem – including access to tools and liquidity. And finally, from the viewpoint of institutions, custody solutions and trust minimization through BitVM technology serve as a way to enter Bitcoin DeFi.

Conclusion

Unlike others, BOB (Build on Bitcoin) seems like one of the most ambitious ventures when it comes to tapping into the vast value storing capacity of Bitcoin via DeFi while preserving user’s faith in centralized custodian and security mechanism of Bitcoin itself.

Thanks to BitVM and Babylon staking that provide such a combo as Ethereum-compatible rollup and Bitcoin’s finality, BOB was able to create a blockchain infrastructure operating on two languages.

BOB already released its native token, built a BitVM bridge that is close to reaching production stage and will release native Bitcoin vaults in 2026, so it continues to explore BTC hodler needs beyond the value storing functionality of its tokens. Given the rising popularity of Bitcoin DeFi solutions, BOB’s approach cannot but attract attention in the future.