Layer 2 project Bitlayer has announced a strategic partnership with Antpool, F2Pool, and SpiderPool — three of the largest Bitcoin mining pools — to accelerate the development of BTCFi (Bitcoin Finance). These pools collectively control over 36% of the Bitcoin network’s hash rate, giving significant weight to the initiative.
This collaboration aims to integrate non-standard transactions (NSTs), which are essential to the architecture of BitVM, Bitlayer’s smart contract verification model. While NSTs conform to Bitcoin's consensus rules, they are not supported by the default Bitcoin Core software, making miner cooperation essential for transaction inclusion.
BitVM: Enabling On-Chain Smart Contract Verification
BitVM introduces a Turing-complete framework for smart contract execution on Bitcoin without altering the base layer’s consensus mechanism. Rather than executing computations on-chain, BitVM verifies them through fraud proofs and a challenge-response protocol similar to Optimistic Rollups. This design preserves Bitcoin’s security guarantees while enabling complex computational functionality.
The mechanism leverages Taproot and minimizes reliance on trust through cryptographic dispute resolution between provers and verifiers. The partnership will see Antpool, F2Pool, and SpiderPool act as “guardians” of the BitVM Bridge — ensuring NSTs are consistently included in blocks and confirmed immutably.
Predicting New Use Cases and Miner Revenue Streams
Industry observers forecast that the successful implementation of Bitlayer's architecture could unlock new DeFi use cases for Bitcoin. By enabling secure cross-chain interaction and rollup integration, BitVM makes it feasible to build sophisticated decentralized applications (dApps) directly within the Bitcoin ecosystem — a capability historically limited to Ethereum and other programmable chains.
Representatives from Antpool emphasized the economic upside for miners. As BTC becomes embedded in more complex financial protocols, the increased transaction volume could drive higher fee revenues and reinforce the long-term viability of the mining sector.
Market Context and Competitive Momentum
The partnership comes at a time of growing interest in Bitcoin-native DeFi solutions. In April, Babylon launched its BTCFi Genesis mainnet, while in March, lending platform Dolomite announced its expansion into Bitcoin via Spiderchain — an EVM-compatible Layer 2 protocol.
Analysts crypto predict that Layer 2 innovations on Bitcoin, particularly those preserving its base-layer integrity, could reshape cryptomarket dynamics and expand the utility of BTC as a financial asset. Bitlayer’s integration with leading pools may serve as a critical inflection point in this forecasted evolution.
