Bitlayer, a Bitcoin Layer 2 based on the BitVM concept, has officially teamed up with three of the largest Bitcoin mining pools—Antpool, F2Pool, and SpiderPool—to facilitate the real-world adoption of BitVM, a significant advancement in enabling Bitcoin-native decentralized finance (DeFi).

Due to technical challenges, Bitcoin’s ecosystem has historically lagged behind other Layer 1 blockchains like Ethereum, notably lacking support for Turing-complete smart contracts. The BitVM paradigm empowers Bitcoin with equivalent security and Turing completeness without changing its core protocol or undermining its foundational integrity.

To turn this vision into a reality, collaboration from miners—the entities responsible for creating new blocks and validating transactions in return for BTC—is essential. This partnership solidifies that cooperation.

The three mining pools contribute over 36% of Bitcoin’s total computing power and have agreed to support non-standard transactions (NSTs), which play a vital role in BitVM’s challenge-response mechanism, according to the firms. Their collective backing alleviates a significant barrier to BitVM’s implementation, edging the system closer toward broader adoption.

NSTs are transactions that comply with Bitcoin’s consensus rules yet are not disseminated by the standard Bitcoin Core software, making their on-chain confirmation dependent on miner collaboration.

In this partnership, Antpool, F2Pool, and SpiderPool will oversee the BitVM Bridge, ensuring NSTs are consistently integrated into blocks, forming part of Bitcoin’s immutable ledger.

The BitVM bridge facilitates the secure and efficient transfer of BTC to other blockchain environments, including rollups, cross-chain protocols, and smart contracts, without centralized intermediaries. This innovation opens avenues for a wider array of Bitcoin DeFi applications while maintaining robust security.

“BitVM represents the most credible path to bring on-chain validation to Bitcoin while maintaining its core security. This partnership solves the critical last-mile challenge of getting Non-Standard Transactions included on-chain,” said Kevin He, Bitlayer’s co-founder, in a press release.

The initiative is also a strategic win for miners facing dwindling income as BTC rewards are halved every four years. Andy, CEO of Antpool, commented, “Bitlayer’s BitVM can drive new economic activity and fee-based revenues for miners.” “Built on BitVM, Bitlayer enables BTC to flow into DeFi and Layer 2 ecosystems, leading to increased usage, new fees, and long-term sustainability for miners,” he added.

Leon Liang from F2Pool underlined the importance of innovation, stating, “We seek to support high-quality projects like Bitlayer that broaden Bitcoin’s capabilities.” Kenway, CTO of SpiderPool, remarked on Bitcoin’s potential as a financial services platform, saying, “This partnership unlocks new opportunities for Bitcoin DeFi, boosting its utility while reinforcing miners’ roles in the ecosystem.”

Bitlayer’s collaboration with mining giants is in response to the rapidly growing demand for secure, Bitcoin-centric DeFi infrastructure that can scale, also paralleling recent integrations with prominent Layer 1 networks like Sui, Base, Arbitrum, and Starknet. Bitlayer is in the process of onboarding more validators and early adopters to secure and grow the BitVM Bridge, paving the way for what may become the cornerstone of Bitcoin’s future evolution.