Hong Kong – Bitcoin layer-2 builders made the case Thursday that the next phase of the crypto’s evolution will not be about replacing bitcoin as “digital gold,” but about making it productive.
Speaking at Consensus Hong Kong 2026, executives from Citrea, Rootstock Labs and investment firm BlockSpaceForce argued that Bitcoin’s scaling layer is less about raw throughput and more about turning the world’s largest cryptocurrency into a programmable financial base layer.
“Most of it — the mission — is just to make Bitcoin a productive asset,” said Gabe Parker, head of business development at Citrea, a zk rollup built on Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s base layer, he noted, was never designed for expressive smart contracts. “It’s about introducing existing narratives like DeFi, lending, lending and adding that stack to Bitcoin… It’s more of a programmability feature than scaling.”
Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar, CEO of Rootstock Labs, pointed out that the industry’s obsession with the term “layer two” misses the point.
“Layer one is a store of value. Layer two is a financial coordination layer … and layer three is a scaling layer that enables payments,” Gutierrez Zaldivar said. “We should start talking about networks that are economic coordination layers.”
Panelists pointed to 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 lock is to build a financial system around it.”
But trust assumptions remain central to the debate. Parker of Citrea criticized the reliance on centralized custodians behind packaged bitcoin products on Ethereum. “If you look at what secures wrapped bitcoin, it’s just a three-to-five multisig,” 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, the institutions are cautious. “On the one hand, they can work with regulated counterparties and have legal access in a centralized way,” said BlockSpaceForce’s Chong. “Or they can implement in the BTCFi permissionless way, but in that case you’re relying on the protocol management and taking on smart contract risk. I think with this in mind, many institutions will actually choose the former solution today, at its current stage.”
Gutierrez Zaldivar of Rootstock Labs argued that hybrid compliance models can bridge this gap in the interim, but emphasized that the long-term vision goes further.
“For Bitcoin to become relevant to the world, it’s not enough to be a store of value,” he said.
For Bitcoin’s scaling advocates, the bet is that even a small fraction of bitcoin flowing into decentralized finance could reshape both the network and global markets in the coming years.
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