Author: Martin Young, CoinTelegraph; Translated by: Tao Zhu, Golden Finance
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson believes that decentralized finance in the Bitcoin ecosystem will surpass all other crypto DeFi in two to three years.
He touted the potential of Bitcoin DeFi while making bold price predictions and highlighting a new model for bridging BTC without using centralized exchanges.
“I started getting into Bitcoin and I love Bitcoin. Bitcoin has been a big part of my life and the only reason I’m here today is because of Bitcoin,” he said in a YouTube video posted Nov. 27.
He expressed disapproval for using Bitcoin early on, but said that “Bitcoin went from a sleeping giant that was in an innovation coma and would never wake up to an awakened giant that is four times the size of Solana and Ethereum combined,” adding:
“DeFi in the Bitcoin ecosystem will surpass DeFi in all ecosystems in the crypto industry in 24 to 36 months, just because of scale and liquidity.”
Hoskinson also pointed to the current discussions among governments around strategic reserves of Bitcoin, and said that Bitcoin itself is their entry point:
“I believe Bitcoin will rise to $250,000 to $500,000 in the next 12 to 24 months due to the investment inflows and the huge interest that has already been generated.”
“Simply put, Bitcoin is the store of value for the internet, and now that it has a DeFi layer, it will continue to play that role for the foreseeable future,” he added before describing a new model for bringing DeFi functionality to Bitcoin via the Cardano network, which he described as the “DeFi model.”
Charles Hoskinson talks about Bitcoin DeFi. Source: YouTube
He said users can “enable DeFi mode” by bridging Bitcoin to wrapped tokens on Cardano. This allows Bitcoin holders to participate in the DeFi ecosystem, trade on decentralized exchanges, use yield-generating tools and keep custody of their private keys.
The development team behind Cardano announced the Cardano-Bitcoin bridge based on the Grail protocol in October.
Depending on the specifications of the underlying protocol, this bridge could be the first step toward offering DeFi applications secured by Bitcoin.
