Why ICP's Native Bitcoin Integration Could Take It to Tens of Billions

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Welcome back to Blockchain Bull. My name is Alex and welcome back to a new episode. It's usually times like this when nothing really is happening and the broader crypto sentiment is mostly bearish that we need to strengthen our conviction. And how do you strengthen your conviction? Because we know that borrowing conviction from somebody else can only get you so far. You need to actually do your own research and understand the token that you're holding or the project or the team that you are invested in. And in this mini-series, I'm going to talk about the top reasons why ICP can pump. I talked about it in previous videos, especially the ones that I did with my brother in the bullish Fridays that we did recently.

[00:00:41]And I got a list here. I'm sure that the list is way longer of reasons why ICP can pump. We're going to break all of those, you know, complicated stuff into easier to digest videos. The main reasons off of the top of my head were this: ICP has native Bitcoin integration, chain fusion interoperability, fully on-chain applications, infinite scalability, HTTP outcalls, SNS DAOs, internet identity, incredible tokenomics, and low inflation. This is one of my favorite things that ICP has going for itself.

[00:01:11]There are no more VC unlocks where VCs waiting to get their tokens to dump on the retail investors. It has a super low market cap versus its technology depth.

[00:01:21]We have the Swiss and Pakistan subnets, the reverse gas fees, cloud engines, the largest R&D team in crypto, and over 500 million dollars spent on development.

[00:01:32]Cycles act as stable compute cost, and we have the Motoko language. If I forgot to add anything to the list, leave it in the comment section below. I will keep adding to this list as more and more reasons to be bullish on ICP come to mind. In this video, we're going to talk about ICP's native Bitcoin integration, which is actually huge. Like this alone could take ICP to tens of billions of dollars in market cap. And there are projects in crypto that if they focused on this and if they actually got to a level where ICP is as far as the Bitcoin integration on ICP currently is, they would be in the tens of billions. They got to tens of billions without even having half of what ICP has. And here I'm talking about projects like Ada Cardano, which, you know, a couple of years ago they tried to make themselves be the home of Bitcoin DeFi and that didn't materialize into anything really.

[00:02:23]And the reason is not that, you know, Ada Cardano, you know, is ill-intentioned or they don't want to do it or they wanted to fool people. The reason why it didn't happen is because it's actually a pretty difficult feat to be able to pull off. Luckily, ICP and Dfinity managed to pull it off and today we're going to talk about exactly that.

[00:02:42]And this is the thing with Bitcoin.

[00:02:43]There is over a trillion dollars sitting in Bitcoin completely idle. It cannot earn yield, it cannot be used as collateral without surrendering it to a middleman, and it cannot power DeFi.

[00:02:55]Every solution so far has either been a centralized, hacked, or both. I think that even the most recent hack, it was in May when Aave were a bridge was hacked and we saw how many tens of millions of dollars were lost in that hack specifically. And, you know, over the years probably like tens of billions of dollars lost to bridges hacks and so on and so forth. ICP solved this problem at the protocol level and almost nobody is talking about it. Well, we are talking about it today. So, uh does that make us a nobody? Well, you let me know in the comment section below. Part one, the problem. Bitcoin is brilliant but broken for DeFi. Bitcoin is the most trusted, most secure, most decentralized store of value ever created, but it has one fundamental limitation. It cannot run smart contracts natively. It can't do DeFi and it cannot be programmable.

[00:03:47]So, what did the industry do? They built workarounds and every single one introduced new risks. With wrapped BTC, you send your BTC to an authorized merchant with custody managed by BitGo.

[00:04:00]Once confirmed, the custodians mints an equivalent amount of ERC20 wrapped BTC on Ethereum. And now all of a sudden, your Bitcoins are no longer in your wallet. You need to trust BitGo with your Bitcoins. And you know the famous saying in crypto, not your keys, not your crypto. Let's say a hack happens, you know, somewhere in those levels of complexity, your Bitcoin is going to be gone. And do you think they're going to refund you the Bitcoin? Say, "Sorry, man, we were hacked, but here is your Bitcoin." No, it's going to be lost and you will have lost one of the most precious assets and the most scarce assets in the world because you wanted to get a little bit of APY or APR or get a loan for your Bitcoin. As we mentioned before, bridges are one of the most critical points of attack, one of the weak links, if you want, in this whole Bitcoin DeFi scenario. Bridges are even worse. Approximately 69% of all cryptocurrency stolen in 2022, this is a little bit outdated, but I would assume that, you know, this percentage is still accurate for nowadays, originated from bridge hacks. Billions gone. Ronin, Wormhole, Nomad, Orbit Chain, and the recent ones because every bridge is just a smart contract sitting between two chains waiting to be exploited. Another big problem of Bitcoin DeFi in its current form is the complexity. You have to do so many additional steps to provide your BTC and actually get the USDC as a loan collateralized by your Bitcoin is super difficult. Here are the steps. If you want to use BTC as collateral on Aave today, here is what you have to do. Convert your BTC to wrapped BTC. You need to trust BitGo.

[00:05:41]Set up an Ethereum wallet. You need to get a MetaMask, you know, get the 12 words, so on and so forth. Bridge the wrapped asset to Ethereum, you have a bridging risk now, and 69% of all of the hacks have targeted bridges. You need to pay Ethereum gas fees, so now all of a sudden you need the Ethereum as well in your MetaMask wallet. You need to navigate Aave's interface and hope nothing gets hacked in between. The five layers of complexity and counterparty risk just to borrow against your own Bitcoin. And it's not even your Bitcoin anymore because somebody else is holding it. DeFi projects building on various iterations of Bitcoin layer 2s bridge a derivative of BTC to another ecosystem, but in doing so, introduce smart contract, centralization, and other potential risk while relinquishing Bitcoin security. The crypto industry had essentially accepted this as good enough, but ICP disagreed. And ICP comes with the solution, protocol-level Bitcoin integration. ICP didn't build a bridge, it didn't create a custodian, it did something far more technically ambitious, it integrated with Bitcoin at the protocol level. They did this a few years ago, back in 2024, I believe, when we got the ckBTC. Smart contracts running on ICP can directly interact with the Bitcoin network without using bridges. ICP nodes can fetch and validate Bitcoin network blocks and make them available for smart contracts to query and read. Smart contracts can also sign and send Bitcoin transactions, allowing them to directly hold BTC. An ICP smart contract can own a Bitcoin address. I have not seen an Ethereum smart contract owning a Bitcoin address, but we can see it with ICP, the most technologically advanced blockchain out there. You would expect a lot more people would be talking about ICP, and I think that more and more people are going to talk about ICP once the ICP price starts moving. You know, people try to ignore it right now, hoping for the best, but when ICP's going to be unleashed, we'll see everything, literally everything that is just a copy of a copy, go to zero, and all of that money is going to flow back into ICP, and ICP is not going to be below its previous bear market low when that happens. I expect double-digit to triple-digit ICP prices when people actually realize what ICP is. So, how does this work? You know, it sounds incredible. How does it work? Think of it like a bank vault that has no single manager. Instead of one person holding the master key, the key is mathematically split into dozens of pieces, each held by a different node running ICP. None of those nodes has the full key. None of them can move your Bitcoin alone. The secret key is never stored in one place. Instead, it is broken down into key shares held by ICP nodes that are reshared periodically.

[00:08:21]When requested, nodes use their key shares to collectively sign BTC transactions without recreating the original secret key. This is important.

[00:08:29]The fact that the key is split into multiple nodes, there is no single point of attack. There is no single point of failure. The chances that this gets hacked, it would mean that the entire ICP protocol gets hacked, and there is literally a 0% chance that that ever happens. This is called a threshold ECDSA, which is a form of chain key cryptography. It is the same mathematical signature scheme that Bitcoin itself uses, meaning that ICP can produce valid Bitcoin transactions that the Bitcoin network recognizes as completely legitimate. No tricks, no wrappers, no middleware. So, no bridges, no custodian, no nothing. Upon a canister transaction request, the nodes use their shares to sign Bitcoin transactions jointly rather than recreating the original private key.

[00:09:14]This signing protocol assumes that more than 2/3 of the nodes are honest and less than 1/3 are compromised. And out of this infrastructure comes CKBTC, chain key Bitcoin. CKBTC is not wrapped BTC. It is not a bridge token. It's not an IOU from a company. It's a one-to-one cryptographically backed twin of real Bitcoin, minted and redeemed entirely by smart contracts on ICP. ckBTC is a multi-chain Bitcoin twin that can be spent with 1 to 2 second finality and negligible fees. It is trustlessly created by chain-key cryptography and a pair of canister smart contracts that directly hold raw Bitcoin without relying on intermediaries.

[00:09:56]And this is a practical difference between wrapped BTC and ckBTC. We can see that wrapped BTC is backed by BitGo, whereas ckBTC is backed by ICP smart contracts. Is there a bridge required?

[00:10:08]Yes, for wrapped BTC. No, for ckBTC.

[00:10:10]Finality? 10 minutes. You cannot have DeFi with 10 minutes finality time. For ckBTC, it's 1 to 2 seconds, so that pretty much allows Bitcoin DeFi to exist. Fees? For wrapped BTC, you have the ETH gas plus bridge fees. For ckBTC, it's negligible. It's literally fractions of a cent. Can it be hacked via bridge? Wrapped BTC can. ckBTC cannot because there is no bridge to hack. And trust model? For wrapped BTC, you need to trust the company, and for ckBTC, you need to trust cryptography.

[00:10:39]However, ICP didn't stop there. They didn't stop at basic Bitcoin transactions. Threshold Schnorr is the next installment of ICP's Bitcoin integration and chain fusion tech, allowing the signing of Schnorr transactions. A signature scheme that enables sophisticated operations introduced with the Taproot update, such as inscribing ordinals more efficiently and allowing trading using new signature schemes. This additional functionalities means smart contracts can execute such operations in a decentralized way, bringing programmability and all the operations of DeFi to Bitcoin. This means that ICP smart contracts can natively interact with Bitcoin. They can send, receive, and hold with ordinals, which are NFTs inscribed directly on Bitcoin, with runes, which are Bitcoin's native fungible token standard, BRC-20 tokens, the original Bitcoin token experiment, and Taproot, Bitcoin's latest upgrade, unlocking complex scripts. ICP isn't just a Bitcoin DeFi layer, it's Bitcoin's entire programmability layer. And here I want to talk about a real-life example and how one company actually took what ICP built and then them themselves built a Bitcoin lending protocol, the likes of which has never been seen before. And that company is Liquity. All of this technology becomes tangible with one project, Liquity. Liquity is the company behind liquity.wtf, the leading lending protocol for Bitcoin assets with over 119,000 plus loans processed and 400 plus million dollars in borrowing volume.

[00:12:04]Liquity is now applying its proven non-custodial infrastructure to the cross-chain market. What Liquity does, you have Bitcoin ordinals or runes sitting in your wallet, you want liquidity without selling. On Liquity, you connect your Bitcoin wallet, which can be a ledger, Xverse, or any other Bitcoin wallet. You don't need an Ethereum wallet. You lock your ordinal or rune as collateral. A BTC or stable or whatever you want to get your loan in gets sent directly to your wallet within seconds on Bitcoin layer one. When you're ready, you repay your BTC plus interest and get your collateral back.

[00:12:38]And this is the cool part. No Ethereum, no wrapped BTC, no bridge, no custodian, no risk of losing your hard-earned Bitcoin, which is pretty important. At the core of Liquity's security is a two of three multi-sig escrow executed entirely on the Bitcoin blockchain. The borrower provides the collateral, the lender provides the Bitcoin, and Liquity's ICP-powered oracle attests to the outcome of the loan. Two of the three parties must sign off to unlock the collateral from an escrow, guaranteeing no single party can control the movement of assets. The ICP oracle component is critical here. By validating Bitcoin native assets like ordinals and runes within ICP canisters, Liquity can process decentralized loans faster and with fewer security risks.

[00:13:22]ICP reads the Bitcoin state in real time, validates your collateral, and enforces the loan terms, all on chain, all without a human intermediary. And the Liquidum CEO actually put it perfectly, Bitcoin was built for self-sovereignty, not surrendering keys to centralized bridges. With Liquidum, users don't have to think about which chain at all. We've abstracted the plumbing, so there's just the blockchain. Bitcoin has the largest market cap, the most mainstream recognition, and the most institutional adoption of any crypto asset. But Bitcoin DeFi is still is in infancy, specifically because every so far has been too risky, too complex, or too centralized. ICP positions itself as the settlement layer for Bitcoin DeFi, not competing with Bitcoin, not replacing Ethereum, but instead activating Bitcoin's $1 trillion plus endowment capital trustlessly, natively, without bridges, and it's doing it years ahead of everyone else. And while everyone else was debating how to build Bitcoin DeFi, ICP had already built the infrastructure. Liquidum is just the first major proof of what's possible.

[00:14:26]Every other chain tries to bring Bitcoin to their ecosystem, ICP brings programmability to Bitcoin without ever moving it. I think there's going to be a huge flip of the script when enough hacks are going to happen and enough tens of millions or hundreds of millions or billions of dollars are going to be lost to those hacks. When people are going to say, "Listen, enough is enough.

[00:14:45]We need a better solution." And then they're going to discover ICP, which has had this solution for the past 4 years.

[00:14:51]And then we'll have to ask those people that have ignored ICP for so long, "What's the reason why you ignored ICP?

[00:14:58]We had this technology for the past 4 years, I think, since 2022. Why have you not talked about ICP and why have you suppressed the ICP price?" But that's a question for when that time comes. The only thing that we can do until then is to educate ourselves and help educate others. Let me know in the comment section below, once again, if I missed anything in the list that I presented at the beginning of this video. And with that, we're done for this video. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you guys in the next one.