What the Bitcoin Awakening Means for Inclusivity

The relaunch of the Elastos Brand is much more than change to the Bitcoin colour, but heralds a new future driven by our game changing Bel2 platform and new BTC Oracle technology. A joint future in which Bitcoin too can be a revitalised force for decentralisation and new applications that change the world.

Elastos SmartWeb was launched in 2018 and has since been building an ecosystem empowered by its special merge mined relationship with Bitcoin for over six years. A key benefit of this merge mining is that over 50% of the hash power of the Bitcoin network is contained within the Elastos ecosystem. However, historically the Smart Web while being EVM compatible, struggled with the perception of Bitcoin being unproductive with challenges in programmability, technical scalability and cultural alignment with the developer community. This network underutilisation kept much of the 1.3 trillion dollars of capital dormant until now.

The development of Layer 2 innovation and particularly Bel2’s BTC Oracle promises to radically change this situation opening up the use of Bitcoin to new financial innovation from staking ELA and earning Bitcoin to a whole new model for empowering the building of fast, secure and flexible apps on the Bitcoin network. The opportunity this new approach offers for entire crypto ecosystem is staggering. Trojan Analysts explains that “considering the market capitalisation is 3.1 times that of Ethereum while its application TVL is currently only a tiny fraction $320 million compared to Ethereum’s $76 bn this scenario presents the opportunity of seven-fold growth.” These figures were articulated with prescience when Bitcoin was at USD 850 m as opposed to today’s 1.3 trillion dollars.

Bitcoin economy awakened

If it follows a patten like Ethereum, the Bitcoin ecosystem will experience user adoption surges, in turn attracting more developers to increase the ecosystems application. Indeed now bitcoin is at the forefront to blend traditional and decentralized systems with a trustless financial paradigm that returns us to the original vision of a fully decentralised power.

Bitcoin, Decentralisation and Elastos

The first Bitcoin white paper was released Oct 31st 2008 and first block mined Jan 3rd 2009. Since it has remained stable, unlike other networks, and has as such demonstrated its viability as the ultimate platform focused on decentalised decisions that remove central power.

Bitcoin has demonstrated that it can provide trust without a central intermediary and therefore be the ultimate decentralised layer for applications but its progress has been hindered with the difficulty of programming and the lack of ability to write trustlessly to the network from outside. Bitcoin operates independently and does not support the smart contracts and apps unlike Ethereum. Elastos Bel2 and BTC Oracle aim to transform this situation over the next 12 months. Furthermore, Elastos through its merge mined relationship and unique consensus system aims to take this decentralisation and scale it while ensuring security as the new Bitcoin economy is rapidly built.

Building for Inclusivity

Our belief at Elastos that this scalable and safe form of decentralisation is critical to deliver on the great promise of block chain – inclusivity. Our goal is to provide a stable platform for a full ecosystem to flourish that generally has inclusivity at its heart. Then as we scale ensure that we are building for inclusivity across all forms of financial and economic activity. Ensuring we maintain our founders’ vision around the revolutionary nature of the decentralised technology that is built into our Smart Web technologies. In return this will create more equitable and profitable outcomes from financial inclusion to social empowerment and sustainable business models for all of our societies. The next 12 months is vital to delivering this vision of Smarter Bitcoin and evenbeing ‘Smart Everywhere there is a lot at stake and as always your community support, ideas and critique are central to making this happen. So let know how we can truly build for inclusivity.

Building on Bitcoin

It was originally developed as a digital currency and not a blockchain platform for applications, so this has delayed its evolution as an eco-system.

Limitations have hindered its development, its openness means no single group or individual dictates its direction, the assets are limited to the Bitcoin network and cannot be removed or transferred and its programming is inflexible and does not provide smart contracts. Most importantly, it is lacking the ability to cope with high traffic and scale, as the work required to fulfil the production of the required blocks is not quick enough and does not have sufficient power in its present state to do so. To develop and provide a feasible solution for applications its Layer1 needs help with speed and scale.

As a result of these scalable difficulties, Ethereum evolved, but its system lacks a decentralised network and security which were two of the three key components being addressed by the Web3 industry in the Blockchain trilema. However, the focus is coming back to Bitcoin to solve this with its decentralised network, security and scalability and with it, the need for Bitcoin to develop alternative solutions by introducing layers, to address these limitations.

Yet to unlock potential there has been a lot of building on or adjacent to bitcoin. Now bitcoin is evolving more than currency now becoming a technology platform as originally visioned. However more refined Layer 2 solutions are needed to bring about more scalable and secure ecosystems, we are now seeing these being introduced supporting smart contracts, these changes will drive innovation and scalability through competition and developer interest.