The comments, reported by The Block on June 16, come as the broader DeFi market has contracted sharply from its October 2025 peak. Estimates of that peak range from approximately $171.9 billion to $237 billion depending on methodology, with the variance reflecting whether liquid staking tokens and Bitcoin restaking products are counted. The market now sits at around $70 billion according to The Block's broader measure.

Within that wider decline, Bitcoin-native DeFi has fared differently across its subsectors. The sector as a whole reached $9.1 billion in total value locked (TVL, the measure of assets locked in smart contracts across DeFi protocols) in October 2025, before contracting to approximately $8.1 billion in Q1 2026 under a broad definition. The sharper drop was concentrated in Layer 2 sidechains, which fell roughly 74%, implying a figure of approximately $2.4 billion, derived by applying that percentage decline to the $9.1 billion peak. Much of the capital that left sidechains appears to have moved to newer platforms: Babylon, a Bitcoin staking protocol, has accumulated more than $4 billion in TVL.

Bitcoin-native DeFi still captures only 0.46% of circulating Bitcoin supply, compared to roughly 15% for Ethereum.

---

Rootstock, the oldest EVM-compatible Bitcoin sidechain (launched January 2, 2018), sits near the center of this story. The chain's own TVL peaked at approximately $260 million in April 2025 and has since contracted to a range of roughly $98 million to $107 million, with the lower figure reflecting March 2026 data and the higher reflecting a modest subsequent recovery.

Daily active addresses peaked at 420 in Q2 2025 and have since declined to roughly 280 as of Q4 2025.

For a network that has maintained 100% uptime for eight years and is secured by 87% of Bitcoin's hashrate through a process called merge-mining (where Bitcoin miners simultaneously secure both networks at no additional hardware or energy costs), the user numbers are notably thin.

---

Two protocols, Money on Chain and Sovryn, account for about 77% of all Rootstock DeFi TVL, a concentration that signals depth rather than breadth.

That pattern fits the executive's framing: the data suggests that the people using Bitcoin DeFi on Rootstock are doing so intentionally and repeatedly, not casually.

---

RootstockLabs has been building on that committed user base as a foundation for a separate institutional push, one targeting corporate treasury capital rather than existing retail DeFi participants. Richard Green, Director of Institutional and Ecosystem at RootstockLabs, has articulated the opportunity that institutional audience represents.

"Institutions want exposure to Bitcoin without forfeiting yield potential," Green said in a statement to Blockworks earlier this year. "Rootstock's infrastructure enables that blend of transparency, composability, and compliance anchored in Bitcoin's security."

In October 2025, RootstockLabs launched Rootstock Institutional, targeting corporate treasury capital through BTC-backed lending, structured financial products, and regulated vault strategies. Six additional institutional strategies are planned through 2026, indicating the scope of the initiative beyond its initial product set.

A partnership with Animoca Brands Japan followed in January 2026, aimed at deploying Bitcoin-native DeFi tools for Japanese corporations.

---

The high-conviction, low-headcount picture looks different when mapped onto markets where Bitcoin DeFi's promise is most concrete. In sub-Saharan Africa, on-chain crypto volume exceeded $200 billion in the year to June 2025, up 52% year over year, with stablecoins accounting for 43% of transactions.

Nigeria's retail Bitcoin activity is particularly striking: Bitcoin accounts for 89% of retail transactions in the country. South Africa is at 74%.

On paper, the infrastructure argument for Bitcoin DeFi is compelling in this context.

Africa pays an average of 7.9% to send a $200 remittance, nearly double the global average, while stablecoin-based transfers can reduce that cost by up to 85%.

The regulatory environment across the region is shifting. Nigeria formally recognized digital assets as securities in April 2025, a significant development for the continent's largest crypto market. South Africa had licensed 248 crypto service providers as of late 2024, and Kenya passed its Virtual Asset Service Providers Act in October 2025.

---

The gap between that demand signal and Rootstock's 280 daily active addresses points to a practical bottleneck. Bridging Bitcoin onto Rootstock currently takes up to 16 hours on the way in and 33 hours on the way out.

For users in Lagos or Nairobi comparing that experience to a stablecoin transfer that settles in seconds, the math on convenience does not yet favor Bitcoin-native DeFi.

---

In South Asia, where India ranks first in Chainalysis's 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index (the first time a non-US country has topped the ranking) and Pakistan ranks third with 18.2 million crypto users, including approximately 5.4 million added in the most recent year, the picture is similar.

A technically engaged Bitcoin-holding population exists, and some portion of it fits the "deep pockets" profile the Rootstock executive described. But mass adoption of Bitcoin Layer 2 DeFi has not followed.

---

The broader structural critique is difficult to dismiss. An analysis by Spark Money earlier this year noted that Solv Protocol, despite holding $2.15 billion in TVL across 1.2 million users, generated approximately $41 in daily revenue. Solv Protocol also suffered a double-minting exploit in March 2026 in which attackers extracted approximately $2.7 million from reserves holding 19,456 BTC, an incident that eroded confidence in the broader BTCFi sector.

The Spark Money report concluded bluntly: "TVL without revenue is a vanity metric. Protocols need fee models that generate sustainable income per BTC locked."

---

Rootstock has been upgrading. Its Lovell upgrade in Q1 2025 cut gas fees by 60%. The Reed upgrade in Q3 2025 reduced peg-out costs by 60%.

A planned upgrade called Union Bridge, built on the BitVMX architecture, would replace the current federated bridge model with a cryptographically trust-minimized alternative, representing the most significant structural change to Rootstock since its launch. No specific delivery timeline has been announced.

Whether that shift arrives in time to matter against faster-moving competitors is an open question. Hemi, a newer Bitcoin Layer 2 entrant, accumulated $1.2 billion in TVL within its first year of operation, roughly twelve times what Rootstock holds after eight.

That comparison frames a question Rootstock has yet to answer: whether a "small-but-deep pockets" base is a durable foundation or a ceiling. Eight years of uninterrupted uptime and a technically sophisticated user community are real assets. Whether they are sufficient as capital concentrates in faster-moving entrants is what the chain's next cycle of upgrades will determine.