Interlay Launches New Layer 2 Network to 'Bring Back Builder Culture in Bitcoin,' Says CEO

This week decentralized Blockchain network Interplay announced the release of its minimum viable product of build on Bitcoin, also known as Bob joining us now is Alexi Interlake co-founder and Ceo. Welcome to the show, Alexi, hey, thanks for having me. All right, tell me about the MVP. What does Bob do? And I have to say I love calling it Bob. It just puts a smile on my face. Um Yes, I mean, Bob is, is a stack. Bob's goal is to allow to create layer tools around Bitcoin and really um innovate on top of the current Bitcoin stack, but also be compatible with other stacks and other kind of infrastructures that we have in the space, notably Ethereum virtual machine that has really seen lots of adoption will continue seeing adoption. Um So Bob is really an attempt to bring back builder culture into the Bitcoin community. Um and really kind of bootstrap an ecosystem of new applications um ranging from dolls D I um advanced NFT projects and so on. All right, tell me about how the Bitcoin community is receiving this because they have been pretty traditionally purist when it comes to the Bitcoin ecosystem what's the feedback you're getting here? I mean, I've spent the last eight years working on Bitcoin. So I was expecting that when we, you know, push to, to announce Bob that we'll step on a few toes. I think. Now, since ordinals, there's been uh like a first step towards a renaissance, you see a lot of builders and a lot of people coming back to Bitcoin really embracing that. Yes, we can do more with, with B DC than just hold and stack sats. Um I'm sure there's a lot of people in the Bitcoin community. I think in fact, I know that are very cautious about changing the Bitcoin core code and I feel that's fine. In fact, we're not rushing anybody to, you know, we're not asking to change Bitcoin today. Bob's goal is to really create an ecosystem, start building and create applications before even we need a fork and then by creating demand and showcasing like, hey, yeah, it works like there is a lot of things we can do with Bitcoin that Bitcoin can be used for and it can range from, you know, really serious things like peer to peer finance and making it more accessible to people around the world. But even fun things like NFTS, once we achieve that, then we can really start a conversation um about, well, you know, how do we make it more or better integrated with Bitcoin itself? Um So, so far, I mean, I've received obviously a few interesting comments on Twitter, but it's been quite OK. Um I, I've expected worse. Um But I also think that um there is a shift in the community and, and we can feel it, some might say if you don't receive those interesting comments on Twitter, you're doing something wrong. So, you know, we, we all experience it. Uh tell, tell me about the difference between building on a Bitcoin layer two and an Ethereum layer two. What's the value prop here for a developer? So, um well, Bitcoin is really a very, very robust system and I believe over the past couple of years, a lot of experimentation has been happening on, on Ethereum and Ethereal two. Whereas the Bitcoin community and the Bitcoin stack has really been pushing to um find mass adoption, really get Bitcoin into the hands of people. It's a very robust stack and Bitcoin is al has also more value than just as a software, right? It has political value, it has been um accepted by, by governments, even it has penetrated various sectors. And if we're honest, like if you start with what three Bitcoin is usually the first thing you know. So for a builder, the value proposition is Bitcoin has somewhere between 100 and 300 million users and this is, this number keeps growing and people are waiting to use it for more than just just payments and people are really tired of relying on centralized providers. So by building on Bitcoin, um and specifically also on like Bitcoin layers that allow you to do more and really build smart contracts. You can unlock new use cases for millions of people that are really hungry to do more with Bitcoin and that are really happy to use the system and it is really very robust, right? Bitcoin has been around for um years, right, without having any issues. So I think the value prop is both technical but also really it it's more than just tech, it has, it's a value proposition of Bitcoin, the worldwide adoption. And, and yeah, I, I think that's kind of the biggest two, you know, on that note, Bitcoin has been really left alone by regulators. It is really the only decentralized um completely decentralized Blockchain ecosystem. Do you think that building and bringing these products that we see on Ethereum over to Bitcoin might increase regulatory scrutiny um around the Bitcoin ecosystem? I don't think so. Right? Because it's Bitcoin itself. Bitcoin is a digital asset. It's not affected by, by other applications being built around it. And um if you look at Bitcoin today, you can already do tokens, right? I I've seen some arguments on, on, on Twitter, right? Where people say, well, we shouldn't have any site chains and anything that attached to Bitcoin and bring more applications because that's how you get shit coin them to Bitcoin. But that's not true. We've been able to do other coins and assets on Bitcoin for for years. Now, colored coins are one of the first use cases. I mean UDT was first minted on Bitcoin. So I would argue that you that adding more functionality and it doesn't mean like layer twos don't change necessarily how Bitcoin itself works. They basically plug in on top of Bitcoin and what's the difference between a layer two and a centralized exchange? Right? From a regulatory perspective, right? So I would argue that no, it should not cause more regulatory scrutiny on Bitcoin. Hopefully, at least if the regulators um look at it carefully. Now, I know that you've raised $9.5 million in VC funding. Uh Talk to us about how you're using the money and if you expect to raise more anytime soon, so we raised the funding, run a couple of years back and we started with really building the first trust as Bitcoin Bridge um to bring B DC to other networks. And since then, we've also expanded on top of that stack. We've built ad five hub. That is the first in the, in the space that allows you to actually borrow in and trade against B DC um without using centralized providers. And that's essentially the funding has been all going towards development work and really building tooling and, and making it as easy to use as possible. And um yes, we will be looking to raise more funding to really bootstrap an ecosystem to make building on this stack more attractive for developers to incubate new projects and to also really invest into infrastructure and new technologies that will hopefully allow us to settle to Bitcoin and build layer tools around B DC as decentralized as possible. And obviously, Ziki roll ups are a very interesting and very promising topic in this area. All right. And last play, Alex say this is the MVP. So what can developers actually do in this MVP phase? And what's your next uh goal on your mil on what's your next milestone? So, on this MVP, you can actually go and you can write brus smart contracts. So you can use Bitcoin libraries for example, ordinals or BRC twenties um and wrap them in smart contracts and you can play around, you can basically verify Bitcoin transactions on the test net. Um But you could also deploy your uh application that's built on EVM and um put that on this test nets, you already start experimenting. So it really tries to combine um the Ethereum and EVM stack that's really widely available. And um the stacks and technologies that we've seen on Bitcoin um for the last 10 years. So you can really go and start experimenting and the next milestone will really be um getting on a public test net that's more robust where people can then integrate with wallets and start getting more and more uh integrations done and then pushing to, to main it before the Bitcoin having happens. I, I think this is a really good time to be building on Bitcoin. There's a lot of opportunities and yeah, we're here to make sure people can take them. All right, Alexi, thank you very much for joining the show and good luck with the rest of the project. I hope the MVP goes well. Thank you so much. That was, that was Alexi. Zam Yatin Interlake co-founder and CEO.