One of the most important projects with the aim of increasing the speed of the Ethereum network is to increase its work in the original block chain of the world: Bitcoin.
Ethereum Layer-2 Starknet, in association with BTC Wallet Xverse, aims to offer a “defi experience of Bitcoin users.”
Xverse said that “it will reach the time of take off Bitcoin”, through integration with Starknet in the second quarter of 2025, in an announcement sent by email on Tuesday.
The association with Xverse is produced in the middle of a period of greater research on the Bitcoin scale using Starknet.
The Starknet Foundation has published a new Bitcoin roadmap, which described how Starknet would remain completely active in Ethereum, while “becoming the Bitcoin execution layer”, with the aim of climbing the network “from 13 TPS to thousands.”
The developers have been increasingly exploring how to take advantage of BTC security and deep reserves to train the broader world Defi and Blockchain. The challenge has been how to address the relative lack of programability of Bitcoin compared to Ethereum and others.
The 2s layer as Starknet aims to address this by acting as an execution layer, doing the heavy work of processing transactions, which are finally given aim through the solution in Bitcoin.
For many observers, the missing piece is OP_CAT: a proposed implementation to the Bitcoin network that could unlock a programability so far invisible, which would be fundamental for the arrangement of Defi.
Crucially, OP_CAT could allow zero knowledge evidence, a cryptographic method to prove the validity of the statements without offering information that can compromise privacy.
OPCAT does not have supporters, but his future as a proposal for improvement of Bitcoin (BIP) remains uncertain. However, the Starknet and Xverse Plan is to make Bitcoin come true even without it.
The objective of Xverse is to provide a Bitcoin Defi experience in its wallet using trust assumptions as the next big thing for zero knowledge tests until the moment OP_CAT is adopted.
“Obviously, the end of the game is a defi without confidence in Bitcoin,” said the founder of Xverse Ken Liao, in Tuesday’s announcement. “This will still have ‘training wheels’ of some assumptions of trust, but it is still very exciting to offer the most precise view so far of how Bitcoin’s intuitive defense will be seen and feels.”
