The Seven Sins of Bitcoin Ecosystem

Pizza Day is celebrating its 14th year, and Bitcoin has broken through $110000 today, setting a new record.

Author: Fairy, ChainCatcher

Editor: TB, ChainCatcher

Friendly reminder: The "Seven Sins of Bitcoin Ecosystem" listed in this article are purely for ridicule, not for deliberate smearing, nor for discrediting the belief attribute of Bitcoin. We respect Satoshi Nakamoto and also respect time. If there are any harsh opinions, we hope that the ecosystem builders will forgive us.

Pizza Day is celebrating its 14th year, and Bitcoin has broken through $110,000 today, setting a new record. Bitcoin is going up, but the Bitcoin ecosystem seems to be going down.

Bitcoin has grown from a white paper to a new anchor of global assets, and the story of Bitcoin ecology has also changed from a simple technical narrative to a complex picture of human nature, market, power and faith. But under all the noise, few people mention the real problem.

Pizza Day is worth commemorating and reflecting on. At this point, we might as well take a more sober perspective and review the "seven deadly sins" hidden behind the Bitcoin ecosystem.

The light of ideal shines into the difficulties of reality

Bitcoin's market value returned to the trillion-dollar mark in early 2024, and it has been nearly a year and a half since then, but its ecological activity is seriously out of balance with its asset size.

So far, only 13 projects in the Bitcoin ecosystem have completed financing in 2025, compared with 72 in the same period last year and 126 in the whole year. The number of financings has been nearly halved, and capital enthusiasm has quickly receded.

Looking at the on-chain data, DefiLlama shows that the current TVL of the Bitcoin ecosystem is only $6.3 billion, one-tenth of the Ethereum ecosystem ($62.3 billion). Among them, Babylon contributed $5 billion, accounting for more than 80%, and the ecological structure is extremely concentrated.

If we compare TVL with the token market value, the problem is even more glaring: BTC's TVL/market value ratio is only 0.2%, far below the average level of mainstream public chains. Ethereum, Solana, TRON and other chains generally maintain above 10%, and their capital utilization efficiency is significantly higher than Bitcoin.

In addition, looking back at the star projects in the Bitcoin ecosystem, such as Stacks and Merlin Chain in the L2 direction, Solv Protocol, Babylon, BounceBit in the staking track, and inscription assets ORDI and SATS, most of them continued to be sluggish in price performance.

Although Bitcoin is the "golden signboard" of the crypto market, it is almost a hollow tower in terms of ecological construction. The following are the "seven sins" we have sorted out.

The first sin: the sin of ecological bubble

From the end of 2023 to 2024, the Bitcoin ecosystem will usher in a wave of "massive" awakening narratives. From inscriptions, L2, to re-staking, it seems that overnight, the dormant BTC ecosystem suddenly became a hotbed of innovation. But when the market boom fades, the real results are still scarce.

Many protocols themselves are not disruptive innovations, neither reconstructing the original paradigm nor creating truly new market demand. A large number of projects are just new packaging of old concepts, with weak underlying structures, crude designs, and out of touch with usage scenarios. The relevant teams are uneven, and few have the real willingness and ability to build for the long term.

As community member @blapta said: "From the perspective of business results, almost none of these so-called technologically advanced projects have actually landed. Whether the agreement is established is no longer the focus. After a round of financing, the story is told and the project dies down. This is not only a technical failure, but also a cultural silence."

The Second Sin - Dogmatism and Infighting

Idealism has never been absent in the Bitcoin ecosystem, but when it merges with dogmatism, it quietly degenerates into closedness and self-limitation. In this system that prides itself on "decentralized belief", once the technical route, consensus mechanism and even the development direction touch upon a certain "fundamentalist" position, it is very easy to evolve into a black-and-white struggle between camps.

Almost every major upgrade of the Bitcoin network has gone through a long process of acceptance. SegWit only covered about 50% of transactions two years after its activation, and it was close to 80% four years later; Taproot, activated in November 2021, was also slow, with an adoption rate of less than 1% in early 2023 and only reaching 39% in early 2024. Developers and the community are extremely cautious about the evolution of the protocol.

The historical