Despite its dominant market share in the crypto sphere, Bitcoin has had limited applications compared to other blockchains that have blossomed to facilitate asset transfers in everything from financial products to video games.
Ethereum, for example, has nearly 6,000 developers actively developing on its network each month as of October 1, according to numbers from Developer report. Bitcoin, by comparison, has just under 1,000 monthly developers.
Call a California-based startup ZetaChain wants to change that by including Bitcoin in the booming decentralized finance (DeFi) economy. From the back of his big Raises $27 million in Series A In August, the company was busy with impressive partnerships to scale its blockchain ecosystem.
ZetaChain is a level 1 blockchain on which developers can build decentralized applications (dApps) and gain access to other blockchains without the need for so-called “bridges” or “wrapped coins”, which are popular solutions that solve one of the biggest hurdles in crypto today — interoperability across different networks.
One of the breakthroughs brought about by ZetaChain, according to its key partner Ankur Nandwani, is that developers can develop smart contracts on the blockchain that can interact with native Bitcoin, essentially adding a smart contract layer to Bitcoin. Smart contracts first proposed by Ethereum are lines of code that execute based on predefined rules and have led to a proliferation of applications such as non-fungible tokens.
“Each blockchain is like an isolated state and we connect them,” Nandwani told TechCrunch. “Most people use Bitcoin as gold. If you can borrow against gold, you should be able to do what you do with gold for Bitcoin.”
Today, ZetaChain announced that it is adding native Bitcoin support to its decentralized exchange (DEX) sushi, allowing users to exchange Bitcoins across 30 networks. Behind the scenes, Sushi has been working on developing its EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatible smart contract on ZetaChain, which means that, for the first time, Sushi can support native Bitcoin with minimal changes.
These Sushi smart contracts can be accessed from the Bitcoin network itself, so Bitcoin users don’t even have to leave the network.
“It’s not just about the increased liquidity from Bitcoin. this is the start of a new chapter in DeFi where we see more practical use cases for interoperability and improved connectivity,” Sushi head chef Jared Gray said in a statement.
In October, ZetaChain integrated with the self-service wallet of the central exchange OKX, allowing users to access dApps on various networks and use their Bitcoins in dApps without the need to fold or bridge from the Bitcoin network itself.
Started in 2021 by serial entrepreneur Nandwani, ZetaChain announced its Series A funding round in August from investors from a range of backgrounds, including quant trading firm Jane Street Capital, crypto exchange Blockchain.com and early stage VC firm China Sky9 stadium.
