- The Bitcoin trilemma helps clarify why the blockchain has very low transaction speeds
- Enhancements in scalability can enhance performance and promote BTC adoption
The latest Bitcoin [BTC] halving occurred on 19 April 2024. The blockchain’s mining reward was slashed to three.125 BTC, lowering provide and forcing miners to optimize their {hardware}. It additionally strengthened the shortage of Bitcoin, making it a viable different as a retailer of worth.
Michael Saylor, co-founder and former CEO of MicroStrategy [MSTR], realized how he may use this mechanism to his firm’s benefit throughout the earlier cycle. In actual fact, he sees it as a hedge towards inflation.
To safe his treasury towards inflation, he’s not afraid to make use of leverage to purchase extra Bitcoin. “The one use of time is to purchase extra Bitcoin. Take all the cash and purchase extra Bitcoin. Then take all of your time to determine what you possibly can promote to purchase extra Bitcoin,” he mentioned in January 2024. The king of cryptos is up by almost 115% since then.
His legendary conviction helps the concept increasingly establishments would add BTC to their treasuries.
Past being an funding and inflation hedge, what do customers count on from the blockchain? What developments progressed in 2024, and what does 2025 probably have in retailer for BTC’s on-chain customers?
Bitcoin trilemma
The three key facets of a blockchain are scalability, decentralization, and safety. Scalability refers back to the skill to course of transactions, decentralization is the distribution of decision-making and management throughout the blockchain, and safety is the community’s skill to defend towards fraud and assaults.
Certainly one of Bitcoin’s main challenges is scalability. Its Proof of Work mechanism and the ever-growing hash price imply that Bitcoin is extremely safe as a community. Decentralization can also be not one of many main drawbacks, though, over time, Bitcoin mining has change into extra centralized because of the emergence and progress of mining swimming pools.
Supply: CoinLedger
The Bitcoin blockchain can deal with about 7 transactions per second (TPS) whereas Ethereum [ETH] and Solana [SOL] stand at 15 and a pair of,600 TPS, respectively. That is the blockchain trilemma. The idea highlights the trade-offs between safety, decentralization, and scalability.
With the intention to have a excessive throughput, networks should sacrifice safety or decentralization and decide to have fewer nodes to allow the next TPS. In the meantime, extremely decentralized networks wrestle with effectivity and velocity.
Options to the scalability downside
Over time, the recognition and variety of customers on the Bitcoin community are prone to improve. This could result in higher consumer demand, and will additionally spark a necessity for the blockchain to reinforce its utility and worth to a consumer.
As a Layer 1, Bitcoin is constructed to have a low TPS and a restricted variety of use instances in comparison with chains like Ethereum or Solana which boast a strong decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. To realize scalability and assist extra advanced purposes, the community has to look in direction of Layer 2 options.
Layer 2 options are constructed on prime of an present blockchains and don’t want a network-wide consensus to deploy, in contrast to Layer 1 options. This makes them a extra versatile and enticing resolution choice.
Among the present Layer 2s are Lightning Community, Stacks, and Merlin Chain. Stacks goals to carry sensible contracts to Bitcoin with out altering the unique protocol. Initially known as Blockstack, it was rebranded in October 2020. Stacks is a Bitcoin Layer for sensible contracts, extending the community’s utility to incorporate sensible contracts, DeFi, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), and dApp (decentralized utility) functionalities.
Lightning Community and its potential in 2025
Lightning Community was proposed in 2015 and has been operational since 2018. It goals to extend transaction speeds and cut back prices by permitting transactions to happen off the principle blockchain.
And but, it faces some challenges. The Lightning Community permits customers to switch by creating channels between them that may stay open for additional funds. It slashes the transaction price, bringing it to the area of $0.001 from the present $2.8 value per transaction, and permits its completion in seconds.
LN had round 15,000 and almost 54,000 cost channels as of August 2024, with a channel liquidity of simply over 5,000 Bitcoin. It has seen the implementation of varied new wallets equivalent to Muun and Phoenix that enhance the consumer expertise. Rising adoption throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America makes e-commerce extra viable. LN utilization is boosted by entities equivalent to Bitrefill, a cryptocurrency present card retailer, and OpenNode, a cost processor that permits retailers to simply accept BTC as cost.
In 2025, Lightning Community’s growth to make use of stablecoins for cost aside from BTC would assist obtain mass adoption. This integration with stablecoins can result in real-world funds utilizing crypto stablecoins and may enable international change transactions to be settled virtually immediately anyplace throughout the globe.
Past Layer 2s
The way forward for Bitcoin Layer 2 options is stuffed with potential, however there’s a additional evolution doable. Layer 3 options constructed on prime of Layer 2 scalability purpose to reinforce interoperability and application-specific performance.
Layer 3 can allow customizable performance by tailoring for particular wants, and optimizing efficiency and effectivity. They’ll seamlessly join totally different blockchains and totally different Layer 2 options, thereby increasing the probabilities of blockchain expertise.
One instance of a Bitcoin Layer 3 is Impervious, the browser constructed on prime of Bitcoin. It’s decentralized, and all knowledge transmitted is completed so privately, leaving no area for knowledge surveillance. It’s also censorship-free.
It makes use of the Lightning Community to course of transactions, which implies that messaging and sharing paperwork might be executed virtually immediately and later submitted to the blockchain. This could levy a price for every transaction, however privateness might be value it.
One other instance of a Layer 3 resolution exterior of Bitcoin is Cosmos. It was designed to deal with the cacophony of blockchains by integrating them into an “web of blockchains”. It presents safe knowledge switch between unbiased blockchains, and sharding is used for scalability. This enhances the potential for dApps by enabling the usage of belongings and functionalities from totally different blockchains.
Learn Bitcoin’s [BTC] Price Prediction 2024-25
Bitcoin Layer 2 options can reshape the utilization of the blockchain. By boosting decrease transaction charges and sooner speeds, it fosters adoption by the general public even for micropayments and informal spending. Developments alongside this path would imply that Bitcoin isn’t just a retailer of worth, however would even be a sensible medium for change – Because it was initially envisioned.
