Previously billing its network as a way for users to trade, lend, borrow, and stake “all in Bitcoin on Bitcoin,” Botanix acknowledged on Wednesday that the leading digital asset by market cap is still primarily viewed as a reserve asset—not a network for building applications.
It is with a heavy heart that we announce we are winding down the Botanix network.
This decision is the hardest one we have made in four years, and we want to share the reasoning openly because the people who backed us, built with us, and used what we shipped deserve more than a…
Botanix was designed as an “EVM-equivalent” network, allowing developers familiar with Ethereum’s programming language to port existing applications with little modification.
Botanix Labs co-founder and CEO Willem Schroé told Decrypt last July that the network featured “systems that honor [Bitcoin’s] core principles of self-custody,” such as a federation of independent node operators to prevent unilateral control over Botanix.
The project noted in its X post that Botanix planned to debut its own token, but the network never achieved product market fit in a way that warranted it. On top of that, Botanix struggled to gain attention flow and revenue, it said, because of competition from established firms.
“We were, and still are, believers in decentralization,” Botanix underscored. “The current direction of on-chain growth is running through distribution, and any team building base-layer infrastructure today is rowing upstream against that current.”
Finally, Botanix users were more likely to use their Bitcoin as a way to generate yield, as opposed to transacting on the network frequently enough to produce significant fees. That ultimately created “a user base that costs more to serve than it generates.”
