Hong Kong – Layer 2 Bitcoin builders argued Thursday that the next phase of cryptocurrency evolution will not be about replacing bitcoin as “digital gold,” but about making it productive.
Speaking at Consensus Hong Kong 2026, leaders from Citrea, Rootstock Labs and investment firm BlockSpaceForce argued that Bitcoin’s scaling layers have less to do with raw performance and more to do with turning the world’s largest cryptocurrency into a programmable financial base layer.
“The biggest part – the mission – is just to make Bitcoin a productive asset,” said Gabe Parker, head of business development at Citrea, a Bitcoin-based zk-rollup. He noted that Bitcoin’s base layer was never designed for expressive smart contracts. “It’s about introducing existing narratives like DeFi, lending, borrowing, and adding that stack to Bitcoin… It’s more of a programmability feature than a scaling feature.”
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar, CEO of Rootstock Labs, noted that the industry’s obsession with the term “layer two” misses the point.
“Layer one is a store of value. Layer two is an economic coordination layer… and layer three is an escalation layer that enables payments,” Gutiérrez Zaldívar said. “We should start talking about networks that are layers of economic coordination.”
Panelists noted growing institutional demand for bitcoin-backed loans and yield strategies. “Bitcoin has become a macro-financial asset that everyone wants to own,” said Charles Chong of BlockSpaceForce. “The next unlock is to build a financial system around it.”
But trust assumptions remain central to the debate. Citrea’s Parker criticized the reliance on centralized custodians behind Ethereum-wrapped bitcoin products. “If you look at what wrapped bitcoin protects, it’s just a three-to-five multisignature,” he said. “That model is not scalable. If you want to manage hundreds of billions or trillions, you need protocol-based assumptions, not counterparty-based assumptions.”
Still, institutions are cautious. “On the one hand, they can work with regulated counterparties and have legal resources centrally,” said BlockSpaceForce’s Chong. “Or they can implement BTCFi permissionless, but in that case, you trust the governance of the protocol and assume the smart contract risk. I think with this in mind, many institutions will choose the above solution today, at their current point.”
Rootstock Labs’ Gutiérrez Zaldívar argued that hybrid fulfillment models can close that gap in the meantime, but emphasized that the long-term vision goes further.
“For Bitcoin to be relevant to the world, it is 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 both the network and global markets in the coming years.
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