Charles Hoskinson: Bitcoin DeFi is a “sleeping giant”
Charles Hoskinson revealed his thoughts on decentralized finance in Bitcoin in an interview with CoinDesk, published on Sept. 9, 2025. For the founder of the Cardano network, Bitcoin DeFi is a “sleeping giant.” Their awakening, which in their opinion will occur within 3 to 5 years, will mean the concentration of a total value locked (TVL) of hundreds of billions of dollars.
According to Hoskinson, Bitcoin DeFi will be larger than Ethereum’s market cap and will have more liquidity in sovereign wealth funds and companies like BlackRock, which will be involved in the network’s on-chain finance.
Additionally, he believes that there is no reason to use Ethereum, the direct competitor of the Cardano network, for the purpose of scaling Bitcoin, and considers that this or an L2, such as Stack, will be in charge of propelling the DeFi ecosystem of the mother cryptocurrency.
As reported by CriptoNoticias, this is not the first time Charles Hoskinson has spoken about decentralized finance in Bitcoin. The first hurdle to the growth of DeFi in Bitcoin is the absence of an executive authority capable of pushing these ideas in the ecosystem, says the IOHK CEO.
But once those obstacles are overcome, Bitcoin would be like “discovering North America, as virgin territory” for decentralized finance.
This is happening in a context where Solana, Ethereum, Aptos, and Sui are fighting for the same limited territory, the developer believes. These applications would have reached the limit inherent in their own current adoption, a limit that Bitcoin could easily exceed due to its superiority in this regard.
For Charles Hoskinson, the essential questions about DeFi in Bitcoin are as follows: how to create a stablecoin in Bitcoin? How to consolidate a decentralized exchange on your network? What technologies are needed to make decentralized finance a reality in Bitcoin? Answering this question, he advances that Taproot and BitVM are two technologies that can help achieve this.
There would be one more hurdle to overcome: building a user experience tailored to the tastes of a Bitcoin maximalist. Hoskinson believes there are three rules to achieving this: security based on Bitcoin’s infrastructure, Bitcoin payments, and goodwill paid in Bitcoin.
Despite what the Cardano founder said, there are already several DeFi solutions in Bitcoin through sidechains, L2, and more, such as Rootstock, Stack, or Botanix. However, these solutions are disintegrated, and the entrepreneur believes that Cardano and projects like Midnight could have the answer to this disintegration.
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