The Bitcoin ecosystem is rapidly maturing as development around the network grows

The crypto industry has grown from strength to strength in recent years, which is best seen by the market’s rapidly growing valuation. Bitcoin in particular has seen its dominance grow exponentially recently, with more and more people continuing to view the asset as more than just a long-term store of value (SLEEP).

This is because a growing list of developers have continuously used the resource’s rapidly evolving dApp framework, helping them access an extremely high level of decentralization, network security and scalability quite seamlessly.

To expand on this topic, until now, most people have largely relegated their crypto development activities to networks like Ethereum, Solana, Binance Smart Chain, Tron, etc. But with the Bitcoin network’s native capabilities constantly being upgraded in recent months, the flagship crypto has continued to gain an increasing amount of traction among dApp builders.

In this regard, it should be mentioned that one of the things that had held back Bitcoin’s mainstream adoption for the longest time was the lack of smart contract programmability. However, with a number of novel offers such as Stacks – an open source network of decentralized apps and smart contracts built on Bitcoin – having entered the market, developers can now access all these untapped features while leveraging other benefits such as censorship resistance, incredible liquidity, transparency, etc. .provided by the Bitcoin network.

Bitcoin’s architectural framework is evolving rapidly

Developing new applications on the Bitcoin ecosystem has continued to become easier, primarily because a growing number of third-party projects have been working to improve Bitcoin’s technical base. For example, as mentioned earlier, Stacks uses BTC’s secure, open and permissionless structure while allowing developers to use a wide range of future-ready technologies such as non-fungible tokens (NFT), smart contracts and decentralized finance (DeFi).

Not only that, but the project also uses a unique architectural framework consisting of layer-2 side chains called “Subnet”. To simplify matters, subnets can be considered peripheral scaling solutions designed to help increase the overall throughput of the Stacks ecosystem (scaling it up to levels currently offered by Solana) while reducing latency issues. This can facilitate minting large numbers of NFTs, processing high volume transactions, etc. on the Bitcoin network seamlessly.

Technically, each subnet consists of its own set of miners and consensus rules that are completely independent of the Stack’s main chain. Over time, many subnets will enter the market, each of which will implement a different consensus model and be built for a unique purpose. Users can interact with a specific subnet by depositing and withdrawing assets from the associated smart contract, the latter being directly associated with the Stacks main chain and settling transactions directly on the Bitcoin network.

Bitcoin’s mainstream influence continues to grow, and rightly so

It cannot be denied that Bitcoin is considered to be the universal standard when it comes to cryptocurrencies. This is because the asset still broadly charts the direction in which the digital currency market is moving. To this point, there is enough statistical information to showcase Bitcoin’s superiority. Recently released data shows that approximately sixty percent of the 38M BTC wallets today have held the asset for over a year at a single stretch, indicating that the flagship cryptocurrency is no longer considered a speculative, short-term tool for monetization.

Also from a numerical point of view, it is worth highlighting the fact that a number of mainstream giants as well as sovereign nations have continued to support Bitcoin. For example, the Central American nations of El-Salvador and the Central African Republic recently recognized BTC as legal tender within their borders. From a liquidity perspective, during Q4 2021 alone, BTC’s average trading volume was $41.5 billion, easily eclipsing its closest rivals, including Ethereum ($19B), Cardano ($7.3B) and Solana ($2.6B), among second.

The future looks good for BTC

Despite projects like Ethereum and Solana being hailed as the development hotbeds of the decentralized application (dApp) sector, Bitcoin’s existing framework offers users one of the most diverse, untapped markets in existence today (at least when it comes to DeFi). Although some functional issues still remain regarding Bitcoin’s technical characteristics, projects like Stacks are trying to help remove these bottlenecks, thereby allowing developers to freely design and deploy smart contracts and decentralized applications on top of the BTC ecosystem.