Bitcoin’s Quiet Plot to Dethrone Ethereum—Here’s How It’s Happening

Move over, ’ETH killers’—the original crypto heavyweight might be stealing the narrative. While Layer 2 chains battle for scalability supremacy, Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade and growing DeFi experiments hint at an ironic twist: the OG asset could outflank Ethereum at its own game.

The Quiet Evolution

Forget ’store of value’ memes. Bitcoin’s scripting upgrades and sidechain innovations (looking at you, Stacks) are enabling smart contracts without Ethereum’s gas fee circus. Institutions already holding BTC? They’ll take native yield over bridging assets any day.

The Cynical Take

Wall Street still can’t tell a hash from a hashtag, but they’ll pour billions into Bitcoin DeFi the second it means juicier returns—and skip the ’tech fundamentals’ sermon entirely. Meanwhile, ETH maxis will keep arguing about ’decentralization purity’ while Visa processes another million Ordinals trades.

Bitcoin Opens Up For Business

Previously, Bitcoin limited these types of transactions with an output type called OP_RETURN. The network automatically canceled transactions with files above a tiny size limit. It would turn these into outputs that were unspendable on the network.

But, blockchain developers have found workarounds. For example, there is the BRC-20 standard exploiting bitcoin ordinals to link files to the blockchain.

Acknowledging the reality of the community, industry, and market’s demand, the Bitcoin Core developer community is scrapping it. They will no longer let OP_RETURN stand in the way of further development along these lines.

That’s another chink in the armor of hardcore BTC maximalists that view Bitcoin NFTs as junk mail on the blockchain and all altcoins and second-layer currencies as distractions from the original cryptocurrency’s true import.

While Bitcoin can be “wrapped” or deposited in smart contracts on other crypto apps like ethereum and Cardano, and then used in their ecosystems, a smart contract issuance system built right on the old Satoshi layer is another way to do it.

Would BTC Prices Go Much Deeper on a Bitcoin App Layer?

If they press to build a marketable product, the Bitcoin L2 developer community may find along the way that it has certain key advantages over deploying BTC on another L1 network.

CashApp Block founder and CEO Jack Dorsey (who also founded Twitter) predicts Bitcoin will reach $1 million in price by 2030. He was also an early Lightning Network advocate and remains a vocal Lightning proponent.

Could a Bitcoin second layer app ecosystem be part of what the crypto doyen envisions priced into that $1 million Bitcoin price forecast?