Botanix bet big on ‘Bitcoin DeFi.’ Its shutdown suggests users never cared

Bitcoin layer-2 network Botanix is being wound down a year after its mainnet went live.

The project cited market conditions and broader indifference within the cryptocurrency industry towards establishing greater utility on the Bitcoin network, in a post on X on Tuesday.

“It did not work,” Botanix summed up. “At least not in this market and not in this timeline.”

The aim of Botanix was to bring Ethereum-equivalent functionality to the Bitcoin network, allowing applications and smart contracts to be effectively copied and pasted onto the world’s first blockchain. The project raised $14.4 million across two funding rounds in 2023 and 2024. Despite this, its total value locked (TVL) at closure was a mere $119,500, according to data from DeFiLlama.

Botanix was one of many layer-2s and protocols to emerge in recent years, aiming to expand Bitcoin’s utility and help it evolve beyond being just a store of value.

The idea was that holders of bitcoin don’t have to just let their asset sit idle and hope for price appreciation. They can also use decentralized finance to generate income on the side. This could involve staking tokens on other blockchain networks or using smart contract-enabled DeFi tools, such as lending or decentralized exchanges (DEXs).

Botanix post-mortem

However, it didn’t go as planned, at least not for Botanix.

The protocol highlighted that “making Bitcoin programmable, productive and integrated into real financial activity isn’t where real-world users sit right now.”

This post-mortem may raise questions about the broader viability of the Bitcoin development sector, which includes other layer-2s like Rootstock or rollups like Citrea, during an extended period of muted sentiment in the crypto market.

CoinDesk reached out to these two projects for comment, but none were received as of press time.

Roshan Dharia, CEO of digital assets investment firm Echo Base, said Botanix’s closure is a sign of things to come amid an “over-built industry, with far more networks competing for users, developers and capital.”

“We expect that dynamic to drive further consolidation and wind-downs through 2026 as activity continues to concentrate in a relatively small number of ecosystems,” he told CoinDesk in a Telegram message.

BTC has lost more than 50% of its value since hitting its all-time high of nearly $125,000 last October, which may leave investors wondering why they should be interested in developing bitcoin’s use when it’s not currently serving its more basic function of storing value very effectively.

“It’s possible that bitcoin’s role as a reserve asset is simply where it settles. If that’s true, there will never be a market for what we are building and no amount of time or capital would change that,” Botanix said.

A simpler route to combining the secure store of wealth offered by BTC with the programmability and utility of other blockchain networks may lie in synthetic or “wrapped” bitcoin tokens. These are tokens that represent BTC on a 1:1 basis that can be traded and staked on networks like Ethereum.

The most established of these is wBTC, which was introduced in 2019, but more recently, Coinbase and Circle have developed their own synthetic bitcoin tokens to appeal to institutional investors and traders.

“For lending, yield, leveraged exposure, wBTC on a mature general-purpose L2 is genuinely sufficient,” Botanix said.

“Users have voted with their behaviour, and the verdict is that the trust assumptions of a wrapped representation on Ethereum are acceptable to almost everyone who wants Bitcoin-denominated DeFi.”

UPDATE (June 10, 12:35 UTC): Adds comment from Dharia.