A version of this presentation was first presented at the Stacks Foundation’s Bitcoin Innovation Virtual Summit on 24 February 2022. You can watch a replay of the event on YouTube here. 

Bitcoin is the granddaddy of all blockchains, and was built to be a “purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash (that) would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution”. Thus far, Bitcoin has proven to be pretty resilient, and with the introduction of the Lightning Network, is also starting to scale to become viable for micro-transactions as well. 

However, payments should just serve as the starting point, and there are many other tradfi verticals left to conquer. The advent of smart contracts, particularly on Ethereum, has enabled an entirely new world of decentralized finance (or DeFi for short) to be built and deployed, allowing crypto users access to other financial service verticals directly on-chain, in a permissionless and trustless manner, the same way payments on Bitcoin are executed.