'Never sell your Bitcoin?' Bitlayer CEO says now you can lend it instead

In February of 2025, Michael Saylor uploaded a short post to X which read “never sell your Bitcoin.” This sentiment has been widely echoed by other Bitcoin advocates and investors

Michael Saylor's advice to "never sell your Bitcoin" has been a popular sentiment among Bitcoin investors, who are often encouraged to have "diamond hands" and to "hodl" the cryptocurrency. However, most people who buy Bitcoin see it as a long-term play and while it has generated great returns for those people, there haven’t been many ways to put that liquidity to work outside of staking.

According to Bitlayer founder and CEO, Charlie Hu, who spoke with TheStreet Roundtable, there is growing demand for Bitcoin-backed lending. Hu explained that centralized Bitcoin lending has been available for some time now, but has dealt with trust issues and bankruptcies that have scared away investors.

“Centralized Bitcoin lending isn’t new — we had it two or three years ago. Unfortunately, some mismanaged funds went insolvent and filed for bankruptcy—BlockFi, Celsius, others,” Hu said.

However, with centralized platform’s reputation in the gutter, decentralized protocols began to pop up, “the world is getting more hybrid—not just centralized lending but decentralized too. That’s the product offering we’re cultivating in our ecosystem,” Hu explained.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) has seen tremendous transaction growth over the past year, with Hu adding that “more transactions are entering the DeFi space—on-chain settlement, trading, lending, derivatives. We’re seeing more adoption in volume and transaction amounts.”

Hu believes Bitcoin is unique among cryptocurrencies.

“I see huge potential for Bitcoin—not as much for altcoins like Solana or Aptos, maybe Ethereum—but Bitcoin will be treated as a highly valued asset across asset management and trading spaces,” Hu said. He also believes that while owning Bitcoin is still largely seen as novel and a high-risk investment, “five years down the road, it’ll be very normal,” including for public companies and nation-states.