Hey everyone, this is Dawei from Exponential and you're listening to Degen Responsibly, a podcast where we invite protocol builders to showcase their innovations, how they work, as well as do a deep dive on risk. Exponential is an investment platform that makes it easy to discover, assess, and invest in DeFi yield opportunities. We want to help you understand the tradeoffs and opportunities so you can degen responsibly. In today's episode, we sit down with Willem, the founder of Botanix, to chat about how they're building the first EVM layer 2 network on Bitcoin. We'll get into why they chose Bitcoin as their base layer, the security and decentralization perks of this approach, and dive into their innovative Spider Chain technology. Willem also gives us a breakdown on what users can expect of Botanix, as well as shed light on their risk mitigation measures. Hey Willem, thanks for joining Degen Responsibly. Appreciate you jumping on the podcast. Before we get started into learning more about Botanix, it would be great to hear more about your background and how you got started in crypto. Absolutely. Great to meet you. So I'm Willem, grew up in Belgium, lived most of my life there actually, then ended up doing electrical engineering in Belgium with a bit of research in cryptography, research there in authenticated encryption. So that's where I got my first time hearing about Bitcoin, but then moved away out of the space a little bit. I ended up in the Middle East, lived in Saudi Arabia, and it's basically there that brought me back to Bitcoin and crypto. I went to Lebanon, I saw the protests against the government happening there, and basically I saw hyperinflation happening there. At that point, inflation was like 20-30%, but you could see that nobody really wants to hold the local currency. I saw some people get their bank in the Middle East, and then that's really the moment that it really hits you. That's when you really see the power of crypto and how it can help out billions of people around the world. So I fully fell down the rabbit hole and basically committed to myself to use my cryptography background to help this space forward as fast as possible, so that we can move as a society as fast as possible to that world where we have a decentralized sound money with permissionless money and currency all over the world. Then I moved to Boston, and then basically while I was in Boston, I was like mid bull run, I started to realize that on the one hand you have Bitcoin, which is really good money. It's decentralized, it's secure, it's sound money. And on the other hand, you have a huge amount of applications, utility being created, a lot of applications, which part of the market fits create a huge amount of value, but most of it is outside of Bitcoin. So basically I started to realize that you have the EVM, which is a huge amount of power, the ability to power the financial system, and I wanted to bring that to Bitcoin. So I found that Botanics Labs that is building a layer 2 EVM on Bitcoin. Nice, nice. It always hits home for people, especially coming from more emerging nations. When they see the hyperinflation happening to their local currencies, it may be a little harder to grasp for people in the United States, but that's definitely one of the core principles that allowed a lot of people to move into crypto and Bitcoin. You mentioned what you guys are building at Botanics, would be curious to kind of hear about the origin story or genesis of how that idea for that came about. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what your vision is for that and what's the sort of the value prop for Botanics? Yeah, absolutely. So I really wanted to move this space forward, wanted to bring utility to Bitcoin, because I also realized, okay, if we are going to bring a global reserve currency into the world, then we need to rebuild the whole financial system. And ideally you want a fully decentralized financial system. And so basically that's where I want to work towards. And then I looked at a space, the whole crypto infrastructure space, and that's like two years ago. And what I started realizing is that you have basically these three technology battles, as I call them. On the one hand, you have the currency battle or layer one battle. On a second technology battle, you have really the virtual machine battle, like which virtual machine is really going to power this financial infrastructure. On a third hand, you have the scalability battle. How are you going to scale this to billions of users? And so in the layer one battle or the currency battle, you really have a bunch of different layer ones, and they all have which product market fit because of different reasons. So Bitcoin is decentralized, secure money. And then you have Ethereum composability, very easy to build applications really to power smart contracts and a financial system. And then if you think about privacy, you think Monero. If you think about speed, you think Solana. And so from all of these, from first principles, I was like, okay, which one is the most important if you want a global decentralized sound money in the world? And that's really that decentralization that underpins everything else. And so that brought me to Bitcoin. And then the second technology battle is really the virtual machines. Now that you really have good money, how do you build that future financial infrastructure? The virtual machine battle is more a software battle in that sense. And we've seen software battles play out in the 80s and the 90s. And the one thing that matters most is distribution. And so the EVM is just way ahead of anyone else. There's so much built on the EVM. And so as a virtual machine battle, we think the EVM basically has won out as a virtual machine or the infrastructure for that future financial system. And then third one is scalability. Do you build bridges to connect multiple layers or do you build in layers on top of each other? And that's where I actually align a lot with what Vitalik wrote about that. If you build in layers on top of each other, it's generally more secure than building bridges between different base layers. And so bringing everything together, I was like, okay, we need a second layer EVM on Bitcoin. And that's where we started off basically. And that's what we're building towards. And we fully believe that a second layer EVM can really power the future financial system on Bitcoin to really bring a lot of utility to Bitcoin. Yeah, interesting the way you put that into perspective with the different battles that we've seen on the layer one battle. I think it's pretty clear so far that Bitcoin Ethereum has led that. And to your point, on the virtual machine side, Ethereum has pretty much dominated that market. And, you know, I do agree with your overall principle that, you know, I think we should optimize for decentralization at the layer ones. But I guess why choose Bitcoin as a layer one, given that Ethereum is also considered, you know, one of the most decentralized networks out there, maybe only second to Bitcoin? Yeah, no, absolutely. I think for the base layer, it's extremely important to be. secure, to be really decentralized. And one of the big reasons Bitcoin doesn't move forward anymore is because it is so decentralized. The whole Bitcoin community is very hard to find consensus and to get upgrades or soft forks. And that's what I can consider more a feature sometimes. I think a lot of development can come on the second layers, like what we are doing. But as a base layer, it's actually very good that it no longer changes. That basically it is very secure. It's proven. You know that it's been running for so long and it just runs and it works, which is a really important basis for something you want to build on top of. And then as the second biggest reason, it's the biggest capital market in crypto out there. It's $700 billion of capital that is waiting to be used in applications, that is waiting to be used in utility. And there was just no infrastructure there to really build applications or dApps on Bitcoin. And that's what we want to change. And so Bitcoin can sometimes be considered as a grandpa. But I think that's also really a good thing. That's what makes it decentralized. Also, the code is very easy. It's very simple. So there's no big, big risks remaining there. And so, yeah, I think it's a huge opportunity basically built on top of Bitcoin. And just because there's already so much capital available there. Yeah, makes sense. Maybe we could dive a little into how Botanix works under the hood. I guess what are the different components that enable you to build this EVM compatible layer on top of Bitcoin? Absolutely. It's actually very interesting. The layer 2 design is what we call the spider chain. And so the spider chain is a new layer 2 design that differentiates it quite a bit from different rollups or optimistic or ZK rollups in the sense that the spider chain is optimized to be decentralized. And so you might have heard here and there that rollups are quite centralized. And that's where we basically came up with a design where everyone will be able to run a full Botanix node and join a decentralized network. How it actually works in reality is we run a proof of stake on Bitcoin. So you stake Bitcoin on Bitcoin and that actually secures the EVM. And so on the EVM, you'll have Bitcoin gas fees are in Bitcoin and it's secured by that proof of stake. So in reality, you will have node operators that will stake Bitcoin and are able to run a full node. So very similarly, like you have on Ethereum main layer, you now have that proof of stake on a second layer on top of Bitcoin. And how we decentralize basically in the second layer is by what we call decentralized multisig. So a lot of layer 2s and sidechains like a Polygon actually have a centralized multisig, basically a 10 out of 15 or a 7 out of 9 or a 5 out of 9 multisig. And that's where really the breakthrough of the spider chain happens is we pioneer decentralized multisigs. And I'm happy to go deeper in that for a moment because it's quite an interesting design. So for example, you have 10,000 stakers, so 10,000 nodes that run Botanix and Bitcoin, and they all put in a Bitcoin stake. Now, the actual Bitcoin will reside in this decentralized multisig. And for example, at one certain moment in time, you generate a new multisig with 100 participants. And those 100 participants will be randomly chosen from all 10,000 stakers. So you now have a random subset of 100 participants chosen randomly from the 10,000 stakers, and they will secure a little bit of the Bitcoin on Botanix. And then you will generate another new multisig. And again, you will choose 100 random participants out of the staker set, out of the 10,000 stakers, and that will generate another multisig. And so you'll have a sequence of different multisigs, and that basically builds this network of decentralized multisigs. The closest in comparison a little bit is the Lightning Network that is built out of two out of two multisigs and is fully decentralized. And then Botanix has a second layer, is basically using two-thirds majority multisigs of 100 participants. But for every multisig, you basically choose randomly 100 participants out of the 10,000 stakers. And that's how you fully build this decentralized layer 2 EVM. Got it. Yeah, that's super interesting. I want to pick your brain on that a little bit more. When you talk about the Spider Chain being this decentralized group of multisigs, you're saying like someone will come to Bitcoin, they'll stake their Bitcoin in the Spider Chain, and then that gets locked up in these groups of multisigs that are constantly being created? Correct. Okay. And then I guess after that, on the Botanix network itself, you're issuing them like an equivalent of their stake Bitcoin? Yeah. So it's very similar to like an Arbitrum on Ethereum. Your whole user experience will actually feel remarkably similar when you're bridging from Ethereum to Arbitrum and back. It's very similar feeling on Botanix. You basically send Bitcoin to the Spider Chain to one of these decentralized multisigs, and then you basically get the Bitcoin on Botanix. And so the alternative on Ethereum is you send the Ether to the smart contract of Arbitrum, and then basically you get the Ether back on Arbitrum. And so that's basically how the bridging works there. Yeah. Okay. So I guess the large difference there is like with Arbitrum and all these other rollups, there's only like one multisig to your point, like a three or five or five out of eight multisig that's securing this very large honeypot of all the assets bridged over. But in the case of Spider Chain, you've kind of split that up, that large honeypot off into much smaller components. So the purpose of that is like, even if it gets exploited, they're only getting a small portion of the assets? Yeah. Well, it's multiple. It's really to be fully decentralized, but then basically it's secured by the stakes. So anyone who wants to steal Bitcoin, for example, will get slashed. And that's basically how you secure the whole network. Okay. Yeah, I got it. I think the other reason that some of these rollups on our layer twos on Ethereum have these multisigs is also, you know, earlier stage projects, they kind of need that, I don't know, speed or ability to make upgrades in case there's any errors or decoding. Is that something that you guys have considered or thought about with the Spider Chain or the Botanix EVM in terms of being able to make upgrades at your discretion? Yeah. Absolutely. I think in the beginning, most of the nodes will be run by a federation. So basically, very few parties that will control the nodes, including Botanics Labs. And so upgrading then becomes easier and easier. But the more the network grows naturally and organically, the more nodes there will be and the more stickers. And then, of course, after a time, it's more like how you see in Ethereum. And then basically you need consensus of the whole Ethereum community basically to do the upgrades. And so it becomes harder over time. And I think that's how it's supposed to be in the beginning. It will be very easy. After a while, you need to find consensus. And that's part of the decentralization roadmap, so to speak. Cool, cool. What about on the Botanics EVM side itself? What's kind of the user experience that we should expect? Yeah, it's actually really incredible. So I definitely recommend everyone to test out the testnet. So once you bridge the Bitcoin from the main layer to the second layer, you now have Bitcoin on an EVM. And it's then the native currency of the EVM. So you have Bitcoin in your metamask and you'll see Bitcoin as for your gas fees and your transaction fees. And it's actually quite incredible. Like user experience is exactly the same as you would experience on Ethereum or any other EVM, really. You will be able to deploy. So we're fully EVM equivalent. So you will be able to deploy any contract very easily, make new tokens. You can launch new tokens in 5 to 10 minutes because it's a standard deployment of the same contract that you have on Ethereum. So you copy paste the Solidity contract and you deploy it on Botanics. And from then onwards, the user experience is exactly the same. So you will have the Bitcoin in your metamask. And from then onwards, you can do whatever you want in the ecosystem. That's super cool. I think it would just maybe be a little weird at first. I'm kind of used to the fact that Bitcoin is now used for, I guess, essentially gas fees. Is that what it would be? It's mind-blowing, actually. The first time I saw it work and we have a pancake swap now. So the first time it's very easy to deploy a token and then swap your tokens. And it's so easy to use that it feels a little bit weird to indeed see Bitcoin everywhere. And then the gas fees, because you expect Bitcoin to be slow. You expect it to take a long time. And so suddenly, it's a big game changer. Yeah, for sure. I do have the question of, with Ethereum, even with its proof of stake model increasing the scalability a bit, they still need to rely on these Layer 2s to further get more scalability and speed. Are you able to achieve the similar level of throughput with this second layer on Bitcoin? Yeah, so we will be a little bit faster than Ethereum. So a few seconds per block, which is already a massive upgrade compared to Bitcoin. And so I really believe that you will scale in layers. I think Vitalik and other Layer 2s have already talked about Layer 3s. I think really, if we want to scale to billions of people, we will need Layer 2s and Layer 3s, multiple Layer 2s actually. And so I believe Botanix will be a very important part of that. So as a Layer 2 EVM, our throughput will be quite a bit more than Ethereum itself, which is already a massive upgrade compared to Bitcoin. Okay, got it. So you're saying eventually down the line, there may be further layers built on top of Botanix itself? Yeah, since we're fully EVM-equivalent, you can basically take an Arbitrum or an Optimism or any ZK Rollup and deploy it on Botanix. Wow, all right, cool, cool. That's super cool to know. Yeah, I guess from a user or developer perspective, what's their rationale to come to Botanix? There's a plethora of Layer 2s they can choose from or an alternative Layer 1s. Is it just for security decentralization? Would that be the main goal for these users or developers? Yeah, it's a very good question. I think if you're more, as a founder, more ideological-minded, you might want to move to something that's really decentralized. But I think for a lot of founders wanting to build dApps, it's about users and a market. And okay, if I'm a dApp developer and I want to deploy a new dApp, I need to choose between all these different layers. Do I deploy on Ethereum? Do I deploy on Arbitrum? Do I deploy on Polygon? Where do I deploy on? And I would say there's two big reasons here to deploy on Botanix, actually. If you deploy on Ethereum, it's a very crowded market. You need to compete with a lot of different other players. And at the same time, you basically have a huge Bitcoin market, which is unexplored. I think it's $700 billion or something right now. And most of that capital is then. And it's actually basically waiting for utility. But there's no dApps yet. And we've seen a lot of demand, both from BlockFi or other players. We've seen Ordals now. But basically, it's an open market and $700 billion of market cap to grasp as potential utility. And as a second thing, you need to keep in mind that there's overall in crypto a massive first mover advantage. When you think about all the big players in the different columns or the different parts of the crypto ecosystem, is it DeFi or is it DEXs or is it perp trading or is it NFT marketplaces? The first big movers always remain the biggest ones. And so there's a huge first mover advantage. And so by being the first one on Bitcoin is actually a massive advantage. And I always believe that anything that has reached product market fit outside of Bitcoin or that has become big outside of Bitcoin will reach product market fit on Bitcoin. We've seen that with the Ordals. But basically, I believe that will happen with any application. And the big game changer here is really the market cap. So in summary, there's a huge market cap with a lot of potential users. There wasn't really infrastructure for it. Now there is infrastructure. You don't need to compete against anyone else because you're the first one there. And so taking in those arguments, I think this is a big opportunity for any dApps that are thinking about where to deploy. Yeah, very compelling points. And what about from the, I guess, the user perspective? I think the way users see these new layer 2s today, it's almost like a farming incentive where they come to this bridge to this new network. They play around on the DeFi protocols and they're anticipating some type of reward in the future. Is that something that users can expect with Botanix or is it mainly to get that security? Yeah, so I think a lot of the users will both come from the Bitcoin side. So I know on the Bitcoin side, there's a lot of people that more believe in ideological reasons for being on Bitcoin, but they also are still humans and they want to trade want to play around in all these applications and since there's not that many Bitcoin Layer 2s out there, I think those users will stay because they'll get used to it and they'll basically hang around there. I think on the other hand, I think we will also see the classical farming. So any new applications on top of Botanics will basically do their tokenomics and do their token launches and so I can see a lot of opportunity there of basically farming a lot of the new tokens or meme coins or any other tokens that get deployed on Botanics. They will probably move around more but I think there's native tailwinds on the Bitcoin side. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned the Bitcoin side. I didn't really think of that beside the user participants since they largely haven't had any access to these EVM chains. To continue on that, I think what we have seen happening, a lot of those users on the Bitcoin side that want to use these applications, they've typically sold their Bitcoin, went to a central exchange, bought ETH and then went on ETH to use those applications. But I think if there's natively an infrastructure and apps on Bitcoin, they will definitely stay on Bitcoin. Yep, yep. Maybe wanted to ask a little bit about the security and risk aspect of Botanics and SpiderChain. Are you able to kind of just high-level review, go over what types of scenarios in which it could potentially be, maybe one of the multisites gets exploited? Yes. I actually love that question because I'm always surprised when I read white papers. Very little white papers talk about potential attacks. And so in our white paper, we go over the classical Sibyl attacks or the classical attacks that you see in cryptography. Now from the basis, and there's a lot of things that play into security, of course, but from the basis, you always need to design a protocol that is absolutely secure. And so the SpiderChain is designed to be optimized against Sibyl attacks. It also has something called forward security. So even if two thirds of the stake is compromised by a malicious party or a colluding party, they will not be able to steal any Bitcoin, which is what's called forward security. And so from the basis, the protocol is actually designed to protect against malicious attack from all different forms that you see. And then of course, you also have the actual implementation. So there's one thing to build a secure protocol or secure white paper or algorithm. There's another thing to actually implement this. And I think what's very important there is the team. So the team actually comes from security backgrounds and basically very much on the part of the team comes from Casa, which is a cold wallet provider for institutions on the Bitcoin side. And so they're, yeah, they're basically trained. It's in their veins to design and implement and code from a very, very good security perspective. And so if you build from day one to be absolutely secure, I think that's a big game changer. And you really have to start from the basis, from the white paper, already think through all different attacks. Then when start deploying and implementing and coding, again, you always have to think about like, what if a malicious actor can come along and basically do this or do that? And I think that's one of the ways you can really, yeah, secure your layers, so to speak. So it's really always trying to think, how can I attack this? And it's a different way of thinking. I think that's where the cryptographic background also comes into play. Like always try to, well, I attacked an authenticated encryption algorithm when I was doing research. And so I have these things like, how can we like exploit all different protocols, so to speak? So yeah, it's really on the protocol level, on the deployment level. And then once you're live, you basically try to invite as many people as possible to try to attack your layer. So now we got the testnet. And so I hope enough people will try to attack different angles of the testnet. And that's basically how you learn. And then over time, you have, of course, the Lindy effect that proves that your protocol is secure. And I think that's what we've seen play out in Bitcoin as well. I think the last bug was found in 2018 or something. So over time, the more people try to attack it, the more secure the whole thing comes. But you have to start thinking about it from day one. Yeah, for sure. You mentioned the forward security aspect. And when I was first reading the white paper, I don't think I fully appreciated it. But I was curious if maybe you could talk to a bit more about how that works exactly and how that prevents an attacker from stealing funds. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's probably the biggest thing of the design. I don't think any other protocol in crypto has forward security or has thought about that aspect. It actually comes from cryptographic design in encryption, where you want to protect yourself against future private key loss, so to speak. So if at some point in the future, you would lose your private key, then basically your encryption, your previous encryption is still safe. So if I'm encrypting messages now with a certain private key, and at some point in time that private key is lost, then all your previous messages are actually still encrypted. An attacker cannot read your previous messages, so to speak. And we use that design to basically secure the second layer. So because you have this moving sequence of multi-sigs, then basically at some point in time, if you lose control over two-thirds majority of the sticker set, all the future multi-sigs are compromised. But all the previous ones that actually hold the Bitcoin are still safe. And so the forward security basically protects you against someone trying to attack the chain, take over two-thirds majority of the stake, and basically steal all the Bitcoin. If they even at that moment in time have two-thirds majority, they can steal exactly zero Bitcoin. So I think it's the most important part of the white paper, but often overlooked. Awesome. Yeah, that's super cool. Thanks for explaining that a bit more. Wanted to go a little more high level now. I think you mentioned you kind of have that first mover advantage with Botanix being the first layer two on Bitcoin. I guess, why hasn't there been any other layer twos built on Bitcoin to this day? Any thoughts there? Or are there any other competitors that you know are on the horizon? Yeah, well, the most basic answer is that it's extremely hard to build on Bitcoin. It's not easy. The language is very limited. You cannot do a lot on Bitcoin. So I think it's always way easier to build outside of Bitcoin as a start. And then I think... Over time, now we have Taproot. So the Taproot upgrade on Bitcoin was actually a very big one. So that was 2021. So the spider chain is also using and leveraging Taproot. This design was not possible before the Taproot upgrade of Bitcoin. So suddenly I think those are two big game changers. There's one Taproot upgrade and two, it just takes a lot of time to design and build on Bitcoin. But that's now changing. I think with an EVM layer on top of Bitcoin, it becomes way easier. And I do think way more teams are going to be building second layers and I think we'll see a plethora of layer twos in the next bull run. And I totally hope so, because it will be really good for Bitcoin. And as I go back with the initial reasons for founding Botanix is really if we want to build that global financial infrastructure and system on Bitcoin, you need a lot of infrastructure, you need a lot of layer twos. And so I don't think the layer twos is a winner take all market. I think there will be a plethora of layer twos exactly like we see on Ethereum as well. And so I'm looking forward a lot to see more layer twos, see more development basically happening. Yep, yep. You know, curious with, you know, recently it was the, I think, the 15th year anniversary of the Bitcoin white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, you know, I'd be curious your thoughts on, do you think this is sort of what he envisioned when he drafted the white paper and created Bitcoin? Did he sort of envision this, you know, this computing layer being built on top of it? Yeah, I do think so. I think at a certain moment in time, you have the question, how do you scale this? Right. From Bitcoin from inception was, of course, the 10 minute blocks, limited block space. And it's really hard to scale that. And I think it was still a very big question mark at that point in time when he left. When was it like in 2011 or something? Like how do we actually scale this? And it's only a few years later during the block size war in 2015, 2016 that Bitcoin actually chose to not upgrade to big blocks. So one of the proposals was like, let's make the block sizes bigger because I think at that moment in time they realized even with big block sizes, you'll never scale to billions of people. And that's where the idea also came from sidechains to basically build layer twos and other blockchains connected to Bitcoin. So I do think actually that he thought about scaling that way. I'm not sure if he made up his mind what the best way to do that was, but I do hope that he would envision and like what we are doing. Yeah, yeah. And I think there's also the criticism, I think one of the biggest criticisms for Bitcoin is its issuance model where, you know, eventually the halvening will stop and there won't be any further issuances. And at that point, you know, miners will rely fully on transaction fees. Do you think what you're building at Botanix is, you know, one step towards getting to a more transaction based environment on Bitcoin? Yeah, absolutely. Actually, I think that that is totally changing in terms of the security budget problem, as they call it. I think the subsidy will run out by 2140, which is still more than 100 years out. And what we've seen already now with ordinals, I think, was it this week or something that the Bitcoin transaction fees actually were higher than Ethereum? Yeah. Even in this bear market, there's a sudden increase in massive amount of transaction fees on the Bitcoin main layer. If you then start having a bunch of different layer twos, suddenly, I think those transaction fees will be much, much higher. And also, I think during the next bull run, we'll see way higher transaction fees because we're now in the bear market and we already see those spikes. And so I think the security budget problem will be solved when there's more utility and more applications being built on top of Bitcoin. So I don't see that really as being a very, very big issue long term. But of course, it needs applications and utility to be built on top of Bitcoin. Awesome. Well, you know, approaching the end of the conversation here, I wanted to ask what's next for Botanix in terms of the roadmap and how can users learn more about it right now? I know you mentioned that there's a testnet going on currently. Yeah. So basically, we've been running the testnet internally for the last month, and one of the reasons is we just want to do a bunch of different tests and testing, trying to see if we can find any holes in the testnet. We will go public with the testnet next week and we start business development, basically trying to reach out to people, see who wants to build applications or bridge over. This is also a question for the audience. If you want to do, if you always want to do something on Bitcoin, but you didn't have an infrastructure for it, now you can do it. Like for fully AVM equivalent, you just copy paste any Solidity contract and bring it over. I would say definitely stay up to date, follow us on Twitter. So that's Botanix Labs and Botanix is B-O-T-A-N-I-X. And then, yeah, the website is the same. It's BotanixLabs.xyz. Definitely stay up to date. I think there's a lot of opportunity here. I think a lot of applications will blow up. So you want to keep an eye on the Bitcoin space. There's a lot of capital out there, so definitely keep an eye on it. Nice, nice. Yeah, it might be a small challenge to get some users to part ways with their Bitcoin. But yeah, definitely interested to see what's ahead for Botanix. Oh, I do have one other question for, I guess, Ethereum or EVM users who want to bridge to Botanix. Will there be some sort of native bridge built? Yeah, so that is a very good question in terms of applications. So a Bitcoin to Ethereum bridge has always been in people's minds, I believe, and we have figured out EVM-EVM bridges, right? So with Botanix, what you can do now is you can build an EVM-EVM bridge. So now you have Bitcoin on Botanix and then you can use an EVM-EVM bridge to basically go to Ethereum and the other way around. So now you could have a decentralized red Bitcoin on Ethereum and you can basically bridge over your assets or your red Bitcoin from Ethereum with a native EVM-EVM bridge back to Bitcoin. And so suddenly that's just the power of the EVM. There's so much that's suddenly possible. There's possibilities you'll have probably like a native GMX on Bitcoin if you want to trade Bitcoin. And if you want to play around with Bitcoin, quite sure we'll have some meme coins in there. We'll have lending markets. And so suddenly this opens up a huge amount of applications on top of Bitcoin. So I'm actually very, very stoked because this immediately solves the big problem of a Bitcoin to Ethereum bridge. Awesome. That's super interesting. Yes, I think that's probably been one area where Ethereum, you see a lack of these Bitcoin alternatives or wrapped assets. And then, you know, you guys are building this pre-decentralized version. There is also a BTC threshold that relies on their own set of node operators and then wrap BTC. So yeah, I think that would be really cool to see how that plays out in the markets. But yeah, overall, really excited to see what you guys are building with the testnet coming up. And yeah, I appreciate you coming on and teaching responsibly. Absolutely. Thank you for having me.