Ethereum
Bitcoin Could Grow Big By Being More Like Ethereum — TradingView News
The idea of Bitcoin BTCUSD drawing ideas from another blockchain may seem absurd. Bitcoin is the one that started it all. It was copied and served as inspiration for Litecoin. 
But a lot has changed over the past 15 years. Although Bitcoin’s dominance has remained constant, the industry has moved beyond simply “buying and holding” coins whose profitability depends on other people buying them. Today, there are many ways to deploy digital assets to earn yield, generate income, and just have fun.
While much of this innovation has emanated from Ethereum and the multi-token, multi-chain landscape it has spawned, the pendulum is swinging back towards Bitcoin. Now equipped with its own Layer 2 protocols, native tokens, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and decentralized finance (DeFi), Bitcoin has the opportunity to experience explosive growth in active users, total value locked ( TVL) and active wallets.
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Can Bitcoin replicate the explosive growth trajectory that Ethereum experienced in 2017 and 2020, fueled by the frenzy of initial coin offerings and DeFi? Taking a cue from the Ethereum playbook, Bitcoin has the potential to grow exponentially over the coming years – if Bitcoin developers work to adopt some of Ethereum’s features.
Ethereum’s selling points
Chief among them is interoperability. Ethereum multi-tokenism has been so successful in part because of universal standards. ERC-20s work everywhere by default and are easily transferred between EVM chains. Bitcoin, in comparison, faces competing token and registration standards whose acceptance is at the discretion of each platform.
Some prefer the BRC-20 standard. Others prefer Runes, developed by Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor. The cursed inscriptions are an entirely different emanation. Bitcoin has a multitude of competing and overlapping standards for token issuance, and its L2 ecosystem is equally complex.
Stacks is the largest Bitcoin L2, unless you count Lightning Network, but there are now dozens of other networks competing to become the preeminent Bitcoin scaling solution, including EVM implementations. Some are sidechains, some are L2s, and some appear, at best, to have only a tangential connection to Bitcoin. This is all very confusing.
If Bitcoin is to become a home for DeFi, NFTs, real-world assets (RWA), and every other on-chain use case that developers try to impose on it, it needs to be more like Ethereum. This doesn’t mean turning to proof-of-stake or changing its underlying code base every six months. Rather, it calls for the judicious adoption of universal standards that will allow value to flow freely across chains.
If Bitcoin developers can work together rather than formulating ideas in isolation, its ecosystem has the potential to grow exponentially in every meaningful metric, from daily active users to TVL. If you succeed, Bitcoin of 2025 will not only be the world’s largest cryptocurrency, it will also become the world’s largest multi-token ecosystem.
Total Value Locked (TVL) describes the value of assets that exist on a blockchain protocol for staking and DeFi and is a good starting point for comparing the respective ecosystems of Ethereum and Bitcoin. TVL is an inaccurate measure because it is possible to “double count” assets that have been reassigned across multiple protocols. Nonetheless, it provides a baseline for assessing network activity and overall liquidity.
Bitcoin’s $1.15 billion TVL is dwarfed by Ethereum’s more than $65 billion – and that’s not counting the billions of other EVM chains, all tightly integrated into the main chain. However, zoom out and it’s evident that Bitcoin’s TVL currently sits at the same level as Ethereum’s four years ago, just before the “DeFi summer” sparked a Cambrian explosion in activity economical and inspires crazes such as yield farming, algorithmic stablecoins and new tokens. and liquidity models like Ampleforth and Ohm.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes
Ethereum was at the height of its ICO craze in 2016 – but none of the new assets launched that year did so on Ethereum. Twelve months later, this figure had increased to over 50%, with over 75% of the value of all crypto assets in existence as of mid-2017 based on Ethereum. The temptation to compare the current growth of Bitcoin assets with Ethereum tokens from this period is overwhelming.
By 2020, Ethereum ICOs had largely disappeared as regulators began cracking down on token sales. But Ethereum has reinvented itself, designing decentralized finance (DeFi) and also becoming the network of choice for another emerging craze: NFTs.
By 2024, Ethereum’s NFT sector has significantly declined in value and volume, exacerbated by high network fees and the growth of L2s, providing users with cheaper ecosystems in which to conduct business. But as the success of Bitcoin Ordinals has shown, NFTs are not dead: they have simply changed their name. The most popular Bitcoin Ordinals collection, NodeMonkes, now has a market cap of over $150 million, and the Ordinals sector saw volume of over $50 million on March 3, a yearly high.
For a long time, the crypto community perceived BRC-20 tokens as insignificant compared to Bitcoin. However, with the growing number of these digital assets, network activity is also increasing. Drawing parallels with the history of Ethereum, we can expect a similar increase in transaction demand.
Current daily trading data for BRC-20 tokens resembles statistics and trading activity patterns for ERC-20 tokens in 2018, with an average daily trading volume of around 300,000. The average price of ETH for this period was about five times lower than this year’s average.
The existence of 14,000 tokens built on this technology adds value to BTC in the eyes of users. This factor can counterbalance the influence of the speculative component and multiply the wealth of BTC holders.
Bitcoin is on the cusp of a parabolic breakout
Could Bitcoin be on the cusp of a similar parabolic breakout? Current on-chain metrics make a compelling case. The market capitalization of all BRC-20 tokens now stands at over $2 trillion, an increase of over 250,000% in less than a year. Meanwhile, the growth in listings – the process by which unique assets such as ordinals are created on the Bitcoin blockchain – has been equally meteoric.
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To date, over 66 million registrations have been recorded on the Bitcoin chain, with over 6.8 BTC spent in fees during the process, or over $466 million. The total number of registrations has doubled since October. It’s easy to spot analogies between Bitcoin assets and the ICO craze that saw Ethereum’s multi-token era begin in earnest in 2017.
ETH saw a tenfold increase in price between early 2020 (less than $200) and mid-2021 ($2,000 and beyond) thanks to the development of the booming DeFi sector. Subsequently, a positive feedback loop emerged: the growth of ETH made DeFi more attractive, thus stimulating demand for this cryptocurrency. Judging by the TVL chart data, Bitcoin is now the point where Ethereum began its active growth in 2020. As decentralized finance increasingly adopts BRC-20 tokens, which can begin to supplant competitors, Bitcoin will respond positively to these changes due to increased demand.
Despite Bitcoin’s higher capitalization, it may not see as meteoric growth as ETH in 2020, given the lack of a low base effect and stricter regulatory conditions. However, even a small increase could still produce a significant change in value.
Bitcoin developers would do well to copy Ethereum’s homework by taking into account the innovations that have served as catalysts for this blockchain over the better part of the last decade.
Gracie Chen is a guest columnist for Cointelegraph and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Bitget. She is also a delegate to the United Nations Conference on the Status of Women. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She previously held leadership roles at Fortune 500 unicorn company Accumulus and venture-backed VR startups XRSPACE and ReigVR.
This article is intended for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be considered legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.