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Growing Bitcoin | The First Virtual Series Focused on Growing Your BTC
Recorded: March 31, 2026 Duration: 0:37:33Space Recording
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. Oh Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Thank you. Thank you. Oh Thank you. Music Thank you. Music so Hi, everybody. Welcome to Growing Bitcoin. Our virtual series focused on growing your Bitcoin. This series was designed for Bitcoin
holders, investors, institutions, and anyone looking to explore new ways to make their Bitcoin
a productive asset, including discussing some of the emerging infrastructure and new yield strategies along with how institutions are participating across
the Stacks ecosystem and the greater Bitcoin economy. Today, we're kicking off this series
with myself, Kyle Ellicott, the Executive Director of Stacks Asia Foundation, and the one and only Manib Ali, the founder of Stacks. And we're going to be
discussing today on how to grow your Bitcoin as we begin to enter Bitcoin's productive era. Welcome,
Manib. Hey, everyone. Hey, Kyle. Great to be here. It is a pleasure. And Manib, we have talked endlessly about this topic together in preparation for this latest era surrounding Bitcoin.
And in our discussions, we have talked about how for many years, almost 17 at this point,
Bitcoin has been viewed primarily as a store of value.
But something has changed. And this moment has occurred where Bitcoin is becoming productive.
Tell us more about that. Why now? Maybe a little bit of the history that led up to this moment.
Why now?
Maybe a little bit of the history that led up to this moment.
Yes, I think if you look at the growth of Bitcoin and how the asset has evolved, I think
initially what I would call the phase one was mostly about basic education.
Most people don't understand or didn't understand what Bitcoin really is, completely foreign concept.
What is a digital asset? How does it have any value? How is it a sort of value?
It's so volatile. People have all sorts of questions.
And I think that that took a long while. And I would sort of like consider the launching of the ETFs.
sort of like consider the launching of the ETFs, right?
So BlackRock's ETF, other ETFs on the public markets,
along with Bitcoin treasury companies
as the turning point
where now there is enough sort of like education
and basic understanding for Bitcoin, right?
So I think that was a milestone moment
where now on the public markets, you have ETFs, you have these public companies like Strategy and others that hold Bitcoin.
And I think because these things trade on the public markets, there is a different level of education and material that needs to be produced and sort of like taken to the general public and mass market, right?
This is no longer, you know, your hobbyist or early adopters or people who are like very
sort of like technical and tech savvy, but taking it more to the general audience.
I think once we reached that point, once we reached that milestone, and people started wondering that, well, now we have
all this capital basically sitting inside these vehicles. It could be a public company, it could
be an ETF, could be just somebody who learned about Bitcoin and has a personal position,
or an institution. I think institutions are playing a big role in it. People start asking
the question that, okay, what's next? What do I do with this capital? Because in typical markets, if you're sitting on cash or
other types of assets, you very quickly start thinking about how do I earn some income on it?
What are the other things I can do with this asset? You don't just leave something sitting
there. And I think that's phase two.
It's a very, very interesting shift because it matures Bitcoin.
And it sort of like marks the era of a next phase of Bitcoin where people not only want
to hold the asset, but actually want to deploy it and have some sort of an income or yield
or other types of strategies that they deploy with Bitcoin as well.
That's many, many great points.
And I want to break that up into a few sections.
I want to go back down to the technical side of this and what actually unlocked this moment
from a technical standpoint.
Why couldn't this have happened six years ago, five years ago, even three years ago?
What makes now the moment
from a technical unlock? Yes, I think that's a very important point. Basically, the way to
think about this is that at the technical level, Bitcoin is actually a pretty simple technology, a pretty simple protocol, so to speak.
It doesn't have smart contracts or other types of more complex functionality at the base layer.
And over the, let's call it the past five, six years, people were trying to bridge Bitcoin
to other networks and in an effort to provide more advanced functionality.
Like if you want to deploy your Bitcoin in a lending protocol, for example, that lending
protocol is not really built on Bitcoin, right? It's built somewhere else, maybe Ethereum, Solana
and your, or Bitcoin L2s as well. and you're trying to take your Bitcoin
to these other networks,
that has some risk
because these bridges,
they can get hacked.
You're going into these smart contracts,
which again,
can have some security issues with it.
And generally speaking,
a lot of the Bitcoin early holders and also institutions, they don't have the risk appetite for it.
So we saw like some amount of traction, but not like an insane amount of traction with
Bitcoin capital getting deployed this way.
So one of the key sort of like technical breakthroughs that
happen, and we as like Stacks developers are pretty proud of it, is we figured out a way
where Bitcoin can participate in yielding strategies in a self-custodial way, in a fully
self-custodial way, meaning that people can keep their Bitcoin in their cold storage.
If you're an institution, you can keep your Bitcoin in a qualified custodian and just
participate from there.
And I think that massively reduces the risk profile of some of these strategies, because
now your principal, now your Bitcoin is actually not at any risk.
You're not going over a bridge.
You're not going into any smart contracts.
You're just keeping your Bitcoin in cold storage.
That sounds like an incredible unlock and a dynamic shift from the days of early productivity
around Bitcoin.
I mean, we've talked about Bitcoin staking and how that has evolved over the last couple
of years.
How does that self-custodial model impact the evolution of Bitcoin staking as we've seen it a couple of years ago with Babylon and also SBTC and some of the things that we were doing across the Stacks ecosystem?
How do you see that evolving with self-custodial entering into the market? Yeah, I think what self-custodial does is the scale basically changes of how much
Bitcoin can participate. So with SBDC on Stacks, people who are not familiar, it's sort of like
the L2 BDC asset. You are going over a decentralized bridge with decentralized set of signers.
And we saw that we got around like $600 million worth of BTC deployed there. But to go into
billions of dollars, I think the number one sort of like ask from institutional
players or other large holders was that we want this to be self-custodial.
And I think that's sort of like how I would think about it.
Like one, and that SBDC clearly has this use case, right?
Like SBDC is what enables a Bitcoin on-chain economy and participation of BDC in DeFi,
smart contracts and so on.
And there are sort of like people
who are comfortable with that, who are comfortable with going into DeFi, who understand
the risks and the trade-offs and actually can participate in different DeFi strategies that
can earn pretty significant yields to them as well, because their risk profile is just different.
And I think the self-custodial path is more institutional, more like OG holders who basically have a very different risk profile
and risk tolerance, and they want to maintain custody of their BDC. So I view this as a new
product, which actually enables a much larger scale deployments into yielding products.
And I think some of that would convert into higher sort of like on-chain DeFi activity as well.
Right. So I think that's the way to think about it. Babylon is actually a good example because
they were more on the self-custodial side. You know, people can debate the technicalities and slashing and some other properties, but
they're definitely more on the self-custodial side.
And they did see, you know, billions of dollars of Bitcoin being deployed, which is the same
thing that we are seeing in our conversations with institutional clients as well.
That once you have self-custodial, the scale of things just completely changes and their risk appetite is very different.
So speaking of institutions, Manib, we've got about 12-13% of Bitcoin's total supply sitting across institutional financial products,
sitting across institutional financial products,
whether that's ETFs, trusts, DATs,
so digital asset treasuries or public companies as well.
That's a lot of Bitcoin sitting there idly right now.
And a question for you,
are institutions actually allocating
towards Bitcoin yield products
like those we're talking about today?
Or are we still in that curiosity
and even early learnings phase of this process? Yeah, I think that's a great question.
I would categorize the market as we're at a place where the need is clearly there.
The institutions are looking for yield like that's that's like a
no-brainer you talk to anybody and they have a lot of bitcoin on the balance sheet and um you
are having a conversation with them very quickly it turns into yielding strategies like that's
that's literally they have people where their only job is to figure out how to make some amount of income on the Bitcoin while reducing the risk.
That has actually led to a bunch of what I will call CIFI strategies, like more centralized type of strategies.
There are these BTC yielding funds now.
they're BTC denominated, they're doing some sort of a basis trade or other types of strategies in
They're BTC denominated.
trying to make Bitcoin productive, which comes with, you know, typical centralization risks.
Like, for example, if let's say you're setting on $100 million of BTC, you're not going to just
give $100 million to a single fund manager. These people have their
different risk tolerance and methods. They might slice up some of their Bitcoin, like 5% or 10%
or something like that to give to a single manager. And they are taking the risk that
some of these funds are going to blow up for one reason or the other at the custody side
or just the type of activities that they're engaging in, something bad happens. So they're
trying to do risk management that way. And it puts a natural limit to how much capital can be deployed
or different yielding strategies, what their sort of like output eventually is. I've also seen people taking
stablecoin loans against their Bitcoin and going into things like even fixed income, right? So this
is a sign of like how much demand there is for some sort of a stable yield on BDC that folks are
willing to almost like go backwards, right? Like go from Bitcoin to dollars by taking a loan
and then parking those dollars in fixed income strategies
just to get some sort of a yield out of that.
I think, again, these things have some merit to it.
You can actually, if you're doing it in a smart way,
generate some income on your BTC,
but it tends to be pretty complicated and limiting in general.
So the big thing that's missing, in my view, is more direct on-chain yielding strategies for Bitcoin, which are self-custodial.
And I think over here, looking at Ethereum and Solana is a good example because both of these assets, both of these networks have native staking capability.
And native staking tends to be more secure from a technical perspective because you're locking your assets in consensus.
And consensus of a blockchain is typically the most secure place for keeping your assets instead of going into smart contracts
or other third-party applications.
And the staking market for Solana and Ethereum
is pretty large, right?
Like between 100 to $150 billion is deployed in staking.
At this point, over the last five years,
it's actually a pretty well-understood market
with tier one distribution partners that institutions can trust and can just work with them in participating in staking.
But there's no clear way of doing Bitcoin staking. There have been some efforts like
Babylon and others, but if you look at the bigger industry, Bitcoin staking as a concept doesn't really exist.
Like institutions don't understand that it's an option or it hasn't been done at scale in a way that Bitcoin staking becomes like a known thing in the industry.
And I think that is a pretty large opportunity that we are excited about.
And we want to offer it in a way that it just makes sense to all of the institutions and Bitcoin holders.
And it almost becomes like a no-brainer that this is something, just like in Ethereum and Solana, if you're not earning the base yield, you're kind of like missing out.
the base yield, you're kind of like missing out, right? And a lot of people were sophisticated
enough, they try to earn the base staking yield, and then try to participate in other strategies
on top of that as well, by having some sort of a liquid staking model, and so on. So I think
that's the opportunity that the developers at Stacks have been focused on over the last
couple of months. And we're seeing a lot of demand for it.
It's exciting.
I mean, again, this asset that has just sat dormant suddenly can now be a productive
asset across your portfolio at any scale and level.
What's needed for this shift to happen?
So the developers across the Stacks ecosystem have been working on this.
There's still a lot of education to be done, but what do you see, in your opinion,
that needs to be done to see institutions move that 12 to 13% of their BTC supply into
productive assets, or excuse me, yield strategies? Yeah. So I think there are obviously some
technical development and even sort of like, you know, some protocol changes that would be needed.
And I don't want to take the spotlight from some of those exciting sort of like announcements coming from the project.
let the timeline run over there and people would learn more about, you know, some of the proposals
and how exactly is the project trying to push this forward. But in terms of institutions,
I think that it's a place similar to like pre-ETFs where a lot of education was needed.
And it's like, it's almost like you need to speak
to the institutions in a language that they understand.
And I think BlackRock, for example, did a great job at it.
Like once, first BlackRock had to be internally convinced,
right?
So it's like very famously, the BlackRock CEO
went from like, you knowRock CEO went from being against Bitcoin to being one of the biggest supporters publicly of Bitcoin.
So I think that type of delta shift needs to happen where a lot of institutional education is needed.
Whatever questions and concerns people have, they need to be addressed. And more importantly,
the feedback from institutions need to be incorporated in some of these products as well,
because I think that world is different and they are used to operating in a certain way and for
good reason as well. So I think that's a process that I'm actually seeing firsthand as some of these products are sort of like moving through the design phase and getting more feedback from institutional clients.
And Manib, we've seen yield models in crypto and digital assets across the board work, but we've also seen them break before, right? Some education
or lack of transparency on where the yield is coming from to some of the technical hurdles
of just producing the yields themselves and much more as well. What makes Bitcoin yield
different and why should people of any sort be trusting it this time around than any other time
in the past? Yeah. So I think a great, great question. And I think, first of all, BTC yield
is very rare, right? Like on-chain Bitcoin yield, I think there aren't a lot of examples of projects
that are able to produce that. And I think Stacks actually stands out on that dimension a lot
because over the last years,
around 4,000 BDC in on-chain yield
has gone out to STX holders,
which is a pretty big number.
I think it might be the largest protocol out there
that has given so much on-chain yield.
And the receipts are there,
right? They are on the Bitcoin L1. People who've been participating in earning this yield have been very, very happy with it because Bitcoin, when you get the yield in BDC, it just hits different,
right? Because when Bitcoin appreciates what you earn sort of like goes up as well. And it makes you start thinking
in terms of earning income in BDC.
And I think that's a very, very important
sort of like mind shift.
So in terms of where the yield is coming from,
for this to be long-term sustainable,
it has to come from real network activity
and real sort of like providing real utility to the network,
right? So like long term, if there are a lot of transactions on a network and that yield is being
converted into BDC and people who are sort of like staking are earning that yield, like that
could be pretty sustainable. Short term, even with networks as large as Ethereum or Solana,
a lot of the yield is actually running on inflation, which is fine in the short to medium
term, as long as there's a clear path to having a lot of network activity. So I think I would
separate consensus yield from other types of sources, because different DeFi ecosystems and DeFi applications can generate yield through different strategies as well.
But then you really have to sort of like go into how exactly that yield is being generated and what asset is it in, what are the risks and returns. And I think what we have seen in the past is some DeFi protocol would, uh,
advertise a crazy number, like 30, 40% yield in their own tokens.
And then, uh, Bitcoiners are sort of like burned by that, right?
Like they're like, those tokens often lose their value and the
yields are sort of like too good to be true.
And then something goes wrong. So I think people have
seen that story many times. And I think what we are trying to do differently, especially given
the almost like the blue chip status of Stacks of the project is let's try to bring a institutional
grade yield that is in BTC that has survived the test of time, works in bull markets, works
in bear markets, and be very, very transparent about where it is coming from today and what
is the roadmap and direction that we are going in, how this would be sustainable in the future.
So speaking of sustainability, Maniv, we start to see Bitcoin become productive at scale.
What will that unlock for capital markets, developers, and everyday holders?
I mean, we start to see the tens of millions of Bitcoin really start to enter into DeFi
applications or BTC5, Bitcoin finance, as some call it,
and even some of the central finance strategies that you had noted before at scale, that's going to unlock a lot for many different people.
In your opinion, what does that look like?
In your opinion, what does that look like?
Yes.
So I think I'm extremely excited about this because when I started in Bitcoin, people
at that time were really excited about creating a Bitcoin circular economy, like a world where
people are actually transacting in Bitcoin, a lot of services are in BDC,
and you're almost building a new sort of like economy around this asset and completely breaking away
from some of the old broken systems and so on.
So it's a very sort of like exciting thing.
One thing that we realize over time is people can't predict
what's the right next step towards that vision, right? The markets, you know,
figure sort of like have this ability of figuring out that what's the thing that the market demands
or the users demand right now. Stablecoins are a great example, right?
Like people weren't thinking initially that stablecoins would be a killer application,
but it turned out to be the thing that a lot of users actually want
and they have real utility for it.
So stablecoins are finding like clear product market fit.
Similarly, Bitcoin as store of value was the first thing that found product market fit. Similarly, Bitcoin as store of value was the first thing that found
product market fit. People understand what it is. They want to hold the asset even through ups and
downs. And even public companies started doing that with BTC. And I think people might have
thought that payments in Bitcoin is something that would take off, but it's really the next step after a store of value
is generating income. That is what the market is asking, right? So we just need to focus on that
next step, like enable the next step so that a new type of utility gets added to Bitcoin and how
Bitcoin is being used. And I think then there will be another step. Then there might be something
else that the market is ready for. And I think eventually we'll be another step. Then there might be something else that the market is ready for.
And I think eventually we'll see the full economy, including payments, including lending,
including on-chain, basically full suite of services.
But right now, what we need to do is focus on the next step that is very clear.
And the market is sort of like pulling that product out of you.
Looking beyond the right now, Manim, just as you came to close,
I'm going to throw you into the future for just a second.
Fast forward five, even one year.
What does growing your Bitcoin actually look like in practice?
Again, five years might be a little
too far away. So we'll look at a year ahead from now. Yes, I think this is something that people
have experienced with banks as well, that it's one thing to start having a savings account
and start having some savings. Once you have any meaningful amount in your savings account,
you start thinking about how to grow it. But you don't want to just park your money in a place where
you're not earning anything on it, right? So people will start going into like better savings
products like money markets or the stock market or other types of places where they can be smart
about their money and try to grow it.
And I think Bitcoin is going through that phase where initially it was like, hey, look, this is Bitcoin.
It's really good savings technology. This is the store of value.
And I think once enough people understand it and now they have some sort of a Bitcoin position, especially institutions, we're entering that phase.
and especially institutions, we're entering that phase.
And I think once that becomes,
so you asked about the next year or a couple of years,
I think I would love to see this part becoming productized
and becoming very normal, right?
So people would get used to having dashboards
and having a menu of options in front of them
that I can park my Bitcoin in this or here.
And here's the type of risk I'm willing to take.
Like self-custodial is obviously very important.
And then here are the rates that you get on your Bitcoin.
And that would become much more normal compared to today.
Like if you look at Bitcoin wallets
or even keeping Bitcoin on an exchange or a custodian, like there's no sort
of like dashboard that even shows you your Bitcoin income, right? Because it's such a foreign concept.
And I think that becoming like a normal thing that people just expect, regardless of their
service provider or their custodian or their wallet, I think would be a very welcome change.
Couldn't agree more. And Maneb, as we come to close, any last words?
I feel like that was a great one to end on,
but anything you want to give the audience
before we close about this next era
that we begin to enter in for Bitcoin?
I think I'm a big believer
that a lot of innovations happen in a bear market.
It's a great time to build things with a clear head
and test it out with real diehard users,
people who are here for the long term.
And I think that helps do the iteration
and getting the product right for the upcoming bull market
when a lot more users come in.
The products are more mature that way.
So I think in some ways, this is the best time
to be building some of these products.
And I'm actually really excited
about this next evolution of Bitcoin.
Couldn't agree more, Maniv.
And thank you so much for your time today
and to all of you listening as well
and tuning in to this very first session
of our Growing Bitcoin series.
Be sure to check out the Stacks calendar for the next Growing Bitcoin session on April 16th. We'll be talking about institutional Bitcoin
and strategies beyond market cycles, but also stay tuned for many future sessions as well.
Until next time, everyone, I'm Kyle Ellicott.
Take care. The Thank you. Music Субтитры создавал DimaTorzok Thank you. Music Thank you.
