2025 was a transformative year for BOB. We celebrated our first full year of mainnet, became the first hybrid ZK rollup, and took major steps toward building the Bank on Bitcoin.

Just in the last few weeks BOB token went live, we published a blueprint for native Bitcoin vaults that will reshape native Bitcoin lending, and also launched native BTC Swaps via BOB Gateway.

Most importantly, in 2025 Bitcoin DeFi reached meaningful scale, proving that Bitcoin's role extends far beyond digital gold - it can power a complete financial system.

Let’s look back at what made 2025 special.

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Bitcoin needs DeFi

Most Bitcoin still sits idle. Using BTC beyond payments typically means trusting custodians, exchanges, or bridges - and giving up custody.

That model has failed before. While exchanges helped drive adoption, they’re not the future we all envisioned. Bitcoin must work in a decentralized way. That’s why we’re building BOB - and why Bitcoin DeFi accelerated so quickly this year.

Bitcoin DeFi TVL grew from roughly $5-6B to $7B within months. BTC staking crossed billions in value, liquid staking tokens became core infrastructure on Bitcoin L2s, and trust-minimized BTC representations gained adoption.

At the same time, institutions began allocating BTC to DeFi, marking a clear shift from speculation to real utility.

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The 100x opportunity

Around 30% of Ethereum’s value is used in DeFi. Reaching the same level for Bitcoin would scale BTC DeFi from $6B to $600B - a 100x opportunity. Beyond crypto natives, Bitcoin DeFi can serve millions seeking better savings, yield, and control over their money.

Our goal with BOB is simple: make Bitcoin usable, accessible, and powerful - while keeping your keys and your coins yours.

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BOB in 2025: A Year of Major Achievements

One of the biggest achievements this year on the technical side was BOB becoming the first hybrid ZK rollup between Bitcoin and Ethereum, using ZK proofs to essentially improve security of the system. The hybrid architecture is already live and connected to Ethereum, and we're working in parallel to enable Bitcoin finality.

We launched 1-click Bitcoin deposits on BOB Gateway in collaboration with LayerZero and BitGo to enable users to go from Bitcoin into wBTC and also the DeFi positions across 11 different chains. Up to this date, BOB Gateway has processed over 68,000 transactions from 30,000 unique users, which clearly shows demand for Bitcoin DeFi across different chains and BOB essentially being the main gateway to get Bitcoin into DeFi.

We also made major progress on BitVM. The bridge is now live on testnet, and our engineering team reduced BitVM3 onchain costs by 87%, down to just $11 per dispute - proving BitVM is practical and affordable for mainnet deployment in 2026.

We also announced native Bitcoin vaults launching in early 2026. These vaults allow users to use Bitcoin as collateral without giving up custody for the very first time in DeFi history. 

BOB pioneered the underlying technology stack and will publish it as open source, to spread the use. With native Bitcoin vaults, BOB offers institutional-grade custody and yield strategies that allow Bitcoin holders to earn returns while maintaining the highest security standards.

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Let’s check the numbers

40 Million Transactions and 550,000+ Active Users

We celebrated 40 million completed transactions from over 550,000 active users on the BOB chain itself - a tremendous growth for a network that only turned one in May 2025.

1.1+ million wallet addresses‍

Over a million unique wallets have now interacted with the BOB chain.

$25 Million in Total Funding

We successfully raised additional capital throughout 2025, bringing our total funding to $25 million - the latest through our successful November community sale.

Number One Bitcoin L2 

2025 marked BOB reaching number one among Bitcoin L2s in terms of DeFi TVL and onchain DeFi activity. 

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Notable Milestones

Product

BOB Token Launch

The $BOB token officially launched on Nov 20. We secured listings across leading exchanges - including Coinbase, Kraken, BitHub, Binance Alpha, Gate, Kucoin, but also on perps from Binance, BitGet, Bybit, and many others - ensuring broad, global access from day one.

BOB Staking

Today, more than 150 million BOB tokens are staked by over 3,200 users, with over 80% locked for 18 months. This demonstrates strong long-term commitment from our community and provides sustainable network security.

Hybrid Nodes

We launched a consortium of hybrid nodes, operated by leading institutions and infrastructure providers: Ankr, ANTPOOL, CoinEx, GlobalStake, Nansen, RigSec, RockX, Satlayer, Sensei Node, Simply Staking, Solv Protocol, StakeFish, Tyr Capital, UTXO Management, ViaBTC. Together, they will help secure BOB, enable trust-minimized BTC functionality and power the next generation of Bitcoin-native applications.

BOB DAO

BOB DAO went live with 50+ governance delegates from different parts of the world. This decentralized governance structure ensures BOB evolves according to community needs and values.

BOB Gateway Evolution

The BOB Gateway processed 68,000+ transactions from 30,000+ unique users. Features now include:

  • Custom actions that allow you to trigger custom DeFi activity across different chains with a single Bitcoin transaction. 

Example: you have Bitcoin, you want to borrow stables on Aave on Ethereum through BOB Gateway - you can do this with a single transaction. You don't need to worry anymore about wrapping, unwrapping, and clicking across five different interfaces. 

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Ecosystem & Native Vaults

bitvm/acc Alliance

We launched the bitvm/acc alliance, onboarding 20+ institutional partners to accelerate the adoption of BitVM. The alliance brings together leading players across infrastructure, liquidity, and Bitcoin DeFi.

Current members include Anchorage, Ankr, Wintermute, Chorus One, Rockaway, Bedrock, Lombard, Solv, Satlayer, Risc Zero and many more.

We won the Bitcoin Research Award 2025 for our BitVM2 research paper that is essentially fundamental for the future of native Bitcoin DeFi and is currently used by BOB and several other innovative teams worldwide.

Strategic Partnerships

BOB partnered with major institutions including Fireblocks, Anchorage and also Chainlink, bringing institutional-grade custody and oracle infrastructure to the ecosystem.

Bitcoin Vaults Liquidation Engine

Our research proposal introduced several technical innovations that allow us to overcome Bitcoin vaults’ core liquidation challenges. Bitcoin Vaults Liquidation Engine is a breakthrough that makes native BTC collateral practical for lending protocols across any chain.

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Events & Community

38 events worldwide: The BOB team organized or spoke at 38 events across the globe, from Bitcoin conferences to DeFi summits, helping spread the Bitcoin DeFi vision.

Global meetups: We hosted community meetups in major cities from Buenos Aires to Hong Kong, connecting builders, investors, and Bitcoin enthusiasts around our shared mission.

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Outlook for 2026

As we look ahead, the vision has never been clearer: BOB will become the Bank on Bitcoin.

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If we look at a roadmap, we achieve this in three phases. We started with the hybrid chain, and this is more or less completed. Arguably, there's always work to be done on the technical side, but it's pretty obvious it's a solved problem. We know what we need to do. BOB is already live on mainnet. We've pioneered the Bitcoin hybrid chain. We've figured out how to use BitVM. We figured out how to build native Bitcoin vaults. And we've established a technological advantage.

Right now and throughout 2026, the focus will be on the Gateway to Bitcoin DeFi. This phase means building the middleware to ensure that institutions, businesses, users, wallets, apps can get frictionless access to Bitcoin DeFi primitives. 

This means building out BOB Gateway, making sure that users can not only bridge, but also swap Bitcoin into any asset on any chain. We’ll work with some of the biggest wallets and aggregators to provide them with the best - cheap, fast and efficient - way to go from Bitcoin into DeFi and other assets and back with trust minimized swaps. We will bring BitVM to mainnet, unlocking institutional-grade BTCFi.

And at the same time, we’ll launch native BTC vaults that allow users to generate yield on their Bitcoin in a secure manner and also use these tokenized positions in DeFi to benefit from DeFi composability.

Once we have built this middleware, once we have onboarded businesses and essentially become the main distribution player for BTC and DeFi, then it will be time to start moving into banking. 

That means offering native Bitcoin lending markets, offering stable coins, building out the swaps and building on top of that, building out savings accounts, credit cards, and essentially microfinancing. 

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Thank You

2025 has been an incredible year, and none of it would have been possible without the support of our amazing community, dedicated partners, and forward-thinking investors.

2026 promises to be even bigger. Thank you for being part of this journey. Here's to building the Bank on Bitcoin together.

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