HONG KONG – The next stage of the cryptocurrency’s development will not be to replace Bitcoin as “digital gold” but to make it productive, a second-layer Bitcoin builder said Thursday.
Speaking at Consensus Hong Kong 2026, leaders from Citrea, Rootstock Labs and investment firm BlockSpaceForce argued that Bitcoin’s scaling layer is more about turning the world’s largest cryptocurrency into a programmable financial base layer than raw throughput.
“A lot of this — the mission — is just to make Bitcoin a productive asset,” said Gabe Parker, director of business development at Citrea, a Bitcoin-based zk-rollup. He pointed out that Bitcoin’s base layer was never designed to express smart contracts. “It’s about bringing in existing narratives like DeFi, lending, lending, and adding that stack to Bitcoin… It’s more of a programmability feature than scalability.”
Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar, CEO of Rootstock Labs, noted that the industry’s obsession with the term “second tier” misses the point.
“The first layer is the store of value. The second layer is the economic coordination layer…The third layer is the scaling layer that supports payments,” Gutierrez Zaldivar said. “We should start talking about networks as the coordination layer of the economy.”
Panelists noted growing institutional demand for Bitcoin-backed lending and yield strategies. “Bitcoin has grown into a macro financial asset that everyone wants to hold,” said Charles Chong of BlockSpaceForce. “The next unlock is to build a financial system around it.”
But the trust assumption remains 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 the security factors that protect Bitcoin, it’s just three to five multisigs,” he said. “The model is not scalable. If you want to manage hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars, you need protocol-based assumptions, not counterparty-based assumptions.”
Still, agencies remain cautious. “On the one hand, they can work with regulated counterparties and gain legal recourse in a centralized manner,” said BlockSpaceForce’s Chong. “Or they could deploy it in a permissionless way with BTCFi, but in that case you trust the protocol governance and take the smart contract risk. I think with that in mind, a lot of institutions today will actually choose the former solution.”
Rootstock Labs’ Gutierrez Zaldivar believes hybrid compliance models may temporarily bridge the gap, but emphasizes that the long-term vision goes further.
“In order for Bitcoin to be relevant to the world, it’s not enough to be a store of value,” he said.
For Bitcoin scaling advocates, the bet is that even a small portion of Bitcoin flowing into decentralized finance could reshape the network and global markets for years to come.
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