Twelve years ago, Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. Today, those bitcoins are worth $340 million, and ever since May 22 – the day he made his fateful purchase – has been called Bitcoin Pizza Day.
Bitcoin is a victim of its own success. Its wild ride in price has forced attention on the value side of the equation. This is understandable, but it also obscures another key aspect of bitcoin: its utility as a means of exchange. It seems that the higher the price of bitcoin, the lower its utility as a means of exchange. That is primarily seen in the slow speeds that are still the norm when transferring bitcoin.
Bitcoin is currently the only digital value reserve and real private property with global consensus, making it the king of all coins. Even so, there is no DeFi killer dapp based on bitcoin that works all over the world. But that is due to change.
Splitting bitcoin
iBitLabs has developed a solution to split bitcoin (BTC) into BitBTC on the Ethereum or EVM-based chains through smart contracts so that one BTC is split into 1 million BitBTC. BitBTC then has faster transfer speeds and lower transfer fees, is more suitable for micropayments, saves more energy and is more convenient for DeFi. BitBTC makes it easier to buy anything with BTC. Indeed, iBitLabs has begun a Twitter campaign offering a reward of 1 million BitBTC to someone who can let Laszlo Hanyecz buy pizza with BitBTC.
The goal of the team is to be the largest BTC payment ecosystem all over the world by solving four key problems that beset bitcoin.
- Bitcoin is extremely inconvenient as the basic unit of valuation for the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem. As a trading pair, for example, the price of XRP/BTC on Crypto Exchange is 0.0000081. The decimal point is often followed by several zeros, which is extremely difficult to identify. Moreover, the public generally believes that BTC should be purchased according to a whole number, which raises the threshold of market participation to those with $40,000. This is regressive.
- The current design of BTC is not suitable for micropayments. BTC only generates a block in about 10 minutes, which lengthens the transaction confirmation time. With the appreciation of BTC, 0.01 BTC is worth around $400, and its purchasing power has been greatly improved. The market demand for micropayments is huge, but the Bitcoin network is not set up to meet that huge demand. Promoting the cross-chain development of BTC and increasing the payment speed is becoming necessary and inevitable.
- BTC can’t easily participate in DeFi across chains, which does not match its status as the king of all coins.
- BTC mining consumes a huge amount of electricity, which is not eco-friendly. The annual electricity consumption of BTC mining has exceeded that of the Netherlands.
Splitting bitcoin helps to solve those problems. But how is it to be done? Essentially, BTC on Ethereum will have a fixed exchange rate directly with BitBTC through a smart contract. There will be no manual work involved and no intermediaries or merchants. This is the equivalent to a central bank directly facing fiat currency users.
BitBTC can be exchanged only if the corresponding proportion of BTC on the Ethereum network is deposited in the smart contract, because the exchange rate of BTC and BitBTC is fixed. Therefore, if there are more BitBTC in the market, then there must be proportionally less BTC. In the long term, the direct exchange between BTC on Bitcoin’s network and BitBTC will use a cross-chain aggregation flash exchange mechanism to solve this problem.
BitBTC will also become part of a wider ecosystem being developed by iBitLabs. This includes BitANT, a governance token rolled out by BitBTC’s DAO that has been launched on Ethereum mainnet and Optimism (L2), which will be launched on BSC. BitANT has introduced yield farming to Optimism and is already in seventh place on Optimism with around $2.8 million in total value locked.
iBitLabs is also considering three creative ecological projects. The first is an NFT trading platform (seesea.io) that will use BitBTC as its main payment token. The second is a Gamefi project, for which BitBTC will be the only circulating token. The third is a system whereby anyone can use BitBTC/SATS to send red envelopes – a traditional way of gifting small amounts of money at Lunar New Year celebrations.
BitBTC will enable Bitcoin to truly live up to its potential and become the basis for a digital system of electronic cash in the same way gold once did and central bank reserves now do. BitBTC becomes the mechanism through which that store of value can be transformed into a means of exchange. Achieving this will bring about the digital currency wave that will revolutionize the global economy. And maybe this time, when Laszlo Hanyecz buys a pizza, he will use BitBTC.
Find out more about BitBTC Institutional Services by visiting https://bitbtc.money/
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