Bitcoin DeFi is already here. Samuel Pat (OP_NET) explains at Consensus 2026 Miami

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]All right, we're live at Consensus 2026 in Miami.

[00:00:04]Uh Samuel Patt from Opnet here to talk about Bitcoin DeFi and more functionality on Bitcoin besides just being a store of value that we're keeping in a cold storage and we forget about it. There's a lot of value that can be that can be moved around and utilized. That's right.

[00:00:21]In DeFi and as we tokenize the stock market and real world assets, tokenizing everything, I hope Bitcoin can play a role in that as well. Yeah, I don't see a reason why Bitcoin isn't the home for all decentralized finance and all major tokenized assets. I think that Bitcoin's one downside is its speed, uh but I think its major upside is its security. And so if you're not requiring high-frequency trading and you are requiring high the highest level of security, which I think most tokenized assets are looking for security over um high-frequency, Yeah. uh especially when it comes to uh houses or the stock market, right? These are things that move at a snail's pace compared to a lot of the rest of the crypto world. So, the idea of them is more not so much about uh speed, it's more about uh security, optimization, efficiency. So, that is I think what Bitcoin really provides. Um And there's nothing stronger in in the blockchain industry than than Bitcoin and more secure than the Bitcoin protocol.

[00:01:19]>> And it has the most liquidity and users out of any blockchain. So, >> Yeah, true. It it it seems like >> advantages, but we need to tap into that potential and the native Bitcoin blockchain can't do that. And that's why Opnet is here to to to solve that. So, can you explain a little bit about the first steps that have been taken from you and the team to bring more of that utility onto Bitcoin? Absolutely. Yeah, I mean it starts with programmability.

[00:01:43]You have to be able to uh issue assets on Bitcoin. You have to be able to build applications that live on Bitcoin, that you can interact with BTC and these assets that you issue on Bitcoin. So, what I'm talking about fundamentally is smart contracts. You need to have smart contracts on Bitcoin And that is what Opt-in is. It's a smart contract protocol for Bitcoin layer one.

[00:02:02]It doesn't change Bitcoin's code. It just basically plugs into Bitcoin and allows you to use Bitcoin in kind of an infinitely new amount of ways.

[00:02:11]Allows you to issue assets that are fully programmable. It allows you to build applications that kind of can be whatever you want them to be from DeFi apps to social media applications to secure messaging platforms. You can build privacy applications. You can kind of do whatever you want. And so that is again it's the concept of Opt-in itself is to kind of unlock the full potential of Bitcoin.

[00:02:31]Definitely. It's super exciting because DeFi is been one of the most exciting pieces that institutional for institutional interest at least in the US and then probably globally as well. I know you guys are in Abu Dhabi and you guys have a world view on this.

[00:02:47]But not so much on Bitcoin. Although institutional wise there is a lot of interest in Bitcoin. But the way that they want to put that capital to work, you have to use centralized providers.

[00:02:59]And getting away yeah it's getting away from the point of of decentralization.

[00:03:04]>> That's right. That's right. Yeah, the hilariously on the most centralized blockchain which is Bitcoin, the only way to do anything with your Bitcoin is in a fully centralized way. Going through a middleman or custodians or bridges to other blockchains or centralized exchanges or in this new wave which has happened over the course of the past couple years, you're kind of into this financial engineering that is kind of again it's a game that's really only available to a very certain small subsection of players in the market.

[00:03:31]Your Michael Saylors et cetera. And it's not democratized by any means. So the average user can't go and earn whatever five or 10% yield on their Bitcoin.

[00:03:41]There's no way for them to do that right now. And the ways that you can earn some amount of yield on your Bitcoin are fully custodial, fully centralized ways to do it. So this is where I think there's a huge gap in the market. I think that there's one DeFi yields, given that they're uh fully decentralized, have historically been much higher than traditional yields.

[00:03:59]Yeah. And the second thing is that it's available to everybody. And so, I think that those those two things that's really that's really what we're trying to bring to Bitcoin. We built this protocol that allows you to put smart contracts on BTC. Our main focus from that is to build great DeFi applications. Definitely. So, there's the the core protocol. There's a lot of other pieces that you need, like a Bitcoin wallet, >> Yep. the smart contracts, Yep. uh DeFi exchanges, or whatever whatever it is.

[00:04:25]So, does your team build that, or does the pro is the protocol open source for anybody to come and develop? Yeah, so uh both. So, the the protocol is fully open source. Anyone can develop anything fully permissionlessly. No one ever has to even get in contact with us. All of it the um documentation is open source.

[00:04:41]Um there's developer tool kits. There's a huge developer community.

[00:04:46]Um we have AI infrastructure that plugs into Claude, or any of your uh uh AI coding um MCP packages that we created. Uh we have I think 20-something that basically know everything about Bitcoin and everything about Opnet, and make it basically you don't have to know how to code in order to actually build a fully functional application on Bitcoin. And I think yeah, that ease of access is really really crucial, because Bitcoin itself is a difficult place to be uh as a user or uh developer naturally.

[00:05:16][clears throat] So, when it comes to building on Bitcoin, that that stuff has to be extremely easy. So, we built all this stuff. Um but anyone can use it, anyone can leverage it, and anyone can compete with us in the market. That's sort of how I think it needs to be is we have to prove, you know, we don't benefit from the protocol itself. We benefit by making great stuff for Bitcoin, and if people use our stuff, if we if we do build the best DeFi protocols, then people will use you know, uh our applications. That's where we make money. Yeah, the best the best should win. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And at the end of the day, we built a protocol to try and push the narrative on Bitcoin and move things forward. And so, even if we end up getting completely out-competed by better teams uh DeFi apps or uh use cases leveraging this technology, at the end of the day, I think it's a net positive for Bitcoin, and that's really where where I want to end up regardless. Definitely. So, if there are long-term Bitcoin holders or people that have a small amount of Bitcoin in cold storage, are they able to move into the ecosystem and start getting a yield like today or where's that Yeah, it's super, super easy to do. I mean, right now, there's I mean, there's an amount of friction that we launched with. Um you have to use our wallet, which is just a Bitcoin wallet that we added Opent protocol support to.

[00:06:30]Basically, it allows you to uh see the assets in your wallet and uh sign the specific smart contract-related transactions on chain. Um but any Bitcoin wallet can integrate Opent. It's super, super easy to do. Uh there's a number of them that are doing it now. Uh same thing with exchanges. Um same thing with like bridging infrastructure. So, a lot of this stuff is coming slowly but surely over the course of the next year. We'll see all this stuff, you know, the ecosystem, the friction will uh become less and less and less over time. But right now, I mean, we want I think we built a great wallet product.

[00:07:01]So, yeah, the first step is yeah, you download our wallet um and you can import your seed phrase uh or your private key from your existing Bitcoin wallet, or you can just send Bitcoin to that Bitcoin wallet. And yeah, then you're you're ready to go.

[00:07:15]You can you literally you go to We built like a DEX application called MotoSwap.

[00:07:19]You have Bitcoin in your Bitcoin wallet, you connect to the DEX, you can start swapping for other assets, you can start staking for uh yield. There's a number of different things that you can do now, and there's kind of an ever-growing community of developers and projects that are building interesting things.

[00:07:32]It's very cool. And in terms of the individual retail investor that has some versus the institutions that maybe they're custodying for others or maybe they have 100 million in Bitcoin.

[00:07:45]What What is the What do you think right now is the interest in the industry for getting that yield or moving the from Bitcoin into the DeFi ecosystem? Yeah, man. I think there's a huge amount of demand for yield on Bitcoin. I think that the protocol itself and the environment on Bitcoin is not ready for institutional capital. I think that we'll have to mature. I think that once we get to you know right now we're again we're at DeFi 1.0. So, we have a DEX, we have liquidity farming.

[00:08:15]You know, 2020 there were some like players like FTX who was farming every DeFi protocol.

[00:08:21]And they actually crushed it on that, but Bitcoin's a much more cautious environment. So, I don't expect any major institution to jump in and start farming tokens new DEX tokens or new protocol tokens that launch. Um that being said, the yields are crazy right now. Um they're super super high. You can You can track it on like we have a defisloth.com which is like our DeFi llama.

[00:08:45]Um that you can track all the yields and stuff. So, there's a lot of opportunity for retail players. I think the earliest adopters are retail players, DeFi OGs from Ethereum who come over. Some There's some people who like to play in the Bitcoin ecosystem. But it's really a small subsection right now. I think once we get to these more mass marketable uh mass use case uh DeFi applications, slowly but surely over time like I would assume within the next year or so we'll see something like Aave on Bitcoin.

[00:09:16]Um an application that looks like Aave on Bitcoin where you have like this decentralized lending on BTC. That's where I think institutional capital and a huge amount of Bitcoiners cuz we'll start to jump in because you don't have to put too much at risk and the yield is safe and the yield is is is steady versus DeFi farming is uh actively managed position. You have to make sure that you're in it right time, out at the right time.

[00:09:39]So, it's for more experienced players.

[00:09:40]And so, yeah, I mean ETH had 10 years of kind of open-source development to try and figure out what works, what doesn't, what works, what doesn't. They got hacks here, disasters there.

[00:09:50]For us, we get to learn from that.

[00:09:53]But, it's not still not going to happen overnight, you know. We can We can cram 10 years into like one, maybe one and a half years of I think ecosystem growth.

[00:10:02]>> But, Bitcoin is is older than ETH.

[00:10:05]And now this technology has come out to to do smart contracts, to do DeFi.

[00:10:10]Why was it not able to be done earlier?

[00:10:12]It actually has always really been able to be done.

[00:10:16]This technology is backwards compatible.

[00:10:19]We built it backwards compatible all the way down to I think 2012. Okay.

[00:10:22]>> So, technically since 2012, you've been able to do this on Bitcoin. It was a little bit It was a bit less efficient um than it is now. There's been multiple upgrades to Bitcoin that make it super efficient for us, uh the way that we're putting data on Bitcoin. Uh but, basically, I think it comes down to two things. One, product market fit for smart contracts and DeFi in general. It needed a place to grow and prove itself to the market before there's like this huge demand on Bitcoin. We say all the time in our community like ETH was a testnet for Bitcoin cuz you got to test all this great DeFi stuff, and now all of a sudden there's this demand for it on Bitcoin. The other thing is I think that Bitcoin at the time had a completely different narrative around it. It was not digital gold at that time. It was payments. Bitcoin was for payments. You used it as currency.

[00:11:04]Uh huge um uh merchants were adopting Bitcoin as an accepted currency, and then that slowed and changed over time, where now Bitcoin is digital gold, and no one actually uses the Bitcoin network, which I think is like an existential crisis for Bitcoin. Because if people don't use the Bitcoin network, there's no fees to to subsidize miners' income. And then, you know, it's not an immediate issue, uh but every 4 years the Bitcoin miners take a 50% pay cut. And the idea in the white paper is that there's going to be so much use of the Bitcoin network that the fees will subsidize the Bitcoin miners when there's no more Bitcoin to give them. Yeah. And that is the value proposition of Bitcoin is that the more miners there are, the more hash rate there is.

[00:11:42]That is what gives Bitcoin its true value. Not talking about, "Well, there's only 21 million of them, so that's the that's the the secret value of Bitcoin."

[00:11:50]>> will will push the price up.

[00:11:52]>> No, that's fake, I think. I think that the real >> of money Yeah. at least to be moved around. Although, as you mentioned in the beginning, you know, Bitcoin is not meant for you know, high frequency necessarily, but some frequency is good.

[00:12:03]>> Absolutely. I think that every Bitcoin block should be full. I think that given how Bitcoin is an asset that is larger itself than the entire crypto market combined, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to fill 4,000 transactions every 10 minutes on Bitcoin. That's the Bitcoin's max capacity. Yeah. So, there's no reason why every single Bitcoin block shouldn't be full. And then I think that like the right scaling solutions will emerge from there. I think whether it's changing Bitcoin itself, which I think it's that's very controversial and I have no interest in doing it, um or scaling layers or, you know, again, there's a lot of pushback from Bitcoiners who are very very uh puritan-minded about Bitcoin, but it's a fallacy their position of like no one should use Bitcoin except for, you know, payments. Well, there's already Lightning Network. Lightning Network doesn't get used. Um not to the not to the degree that people thought it would be used. And there's not a ton of money being put into making it a better experience or furthering its adoption. And so, I think that if you can't make a transaction on layer one because it's too expensive. If I want to send you $30 of BTC, there's no reason I would go through the process of using the Lightning Network. It basically costs me nothing to make a Bitcoin layer one transaction right now. So, I would just send you 30 bucks on Bitcoin layer one and I don't give a But, if it now costs me $25 to make a Bitcoin transaction because there's so much high value, whether it's huge swaps between Bitcoin and stables or lending or it could be anything on Bitcoin. Tokenized asset trading against BTC.

[00:13:32]If that is what's happening on layer one, and it's everyone else is priced out of the market, then better adoption for lightning network as a payment method is that's where I think that attention will focus. The The money will be focused there.

[00:13:45]Scaling in layers for, you know, making everything on Bitcoin faster and cheaper.

[00:13:50]That's where I think those conversations can emerge, but we're not ready for that yet. Because as of right now, it costs me like 20 cents to make a Bitcoin transaction. Yeah, it's only when the congestion hits and and you have that four or five thousand transactions per block, then it it can go up to five, ten dollars more, you know.

[00:14:09]>> Yeah, I mean that's really where the rubber hits the road, I think, for anyone who's like a true believer in Bitcoin as payments and the Bitcoin network doesn't need to scale and doesn't need to do anything different and nothing needs to change about about Bitcoin. It's totally perfect as it is right now.

[00:14:20]Um one, they discount the fact that they've changed Bitcoin a million times in the past. And two, that there are more than 4,000 people in the world who want to transact with their money every 10 minutes. There's billions of people in the world and the Bitcoin network just simply does not have that capacity. So, either it stays as it is and every block is full and miners are subsidized that way and the rest of the activity is pushed towards secondary layers, which is that's a potentially viable theory, or the actual Bitcoin network itself needs to scale. Again, I've got no I've got no hat to throw in the ring when it comes to scaling solutions for Bitcoin itself. I think that gets complicated, it gets political. I think it's better to scale on layers and maintain Bitcoin's like like underlying value proposition of you know, I think it's good that it's slow and expensive. There are certain things that are highly optimized being slow and expensive, especially if they're secure.

[00:15:15]And again, there's a reason why like the right amount of friction is what powers our entire market, right? I was talking to my friend about this the other day.

[00:15:24]Uh we were talking about like uh Pokémon cards and the collect the collectibles market and the fact that there is friction in the collectibles market is what has maintained its um velocity over the course of the past few years. We were we were talking about how in just 2021, 2022, there were a few companies who raised money on um you know, tokenizing like uh NFTs for like these digital collectibles. They're sorry, or these collectibles and they're digitizing them, whatever. This is before like the huge Pokémon run came.

[00:15:54]If it was if if these assets were traded as crypto tokens, given the efficiency of like trading NFTs, the market would have had a huge pump and a huge dump and that would have been it. The friction is what kind of keeps it going, right? The fact that I have to have a physical card, I have to go to a meet-up, I have to buy it online, whatever. It takes weeks to ship to me, I have to ship it to somebody to grade it. Like these things are the things that keep that market going and you can look at a million other parallels in the traditional finance world, you know, buying houses, taking a loan, even buying stocks. Like these are not things that we have, especially in size, we don't have access to this stuff at the at the drop of a hat like how we do like trading meme coins or whatever on Solana. So Yeah. There's a reason why I think slower and uh more expensive can be a better environment for especially especially DeFi, I think is is best positioned in an environment like that.

[00:16:46]Yeah. That's a really interesting uh theory that you know, there's a things that people would call Bitcoin imperfect, that's what makes it perfect, that has kept it going for the last 15-plus years. I agree, man. I agree. I think that we don't look at it like a flaw, it's a feature. You know, Bitcoin speed is a feature. We coined this term slow-fi. That's our We have a thesis around slow-fi, which is that DeFi itself performs better in a slower environment. There's a reason why there's less DeFi on faster and more optimized chains because when it comes to like a staking scheme, even a really basic staking policy where I have a token, token A, it's for whatever. I have a DeFi protocol, I have a DEX or something, right? And I have 10% of my token supply is allocated towards people who provide liquidity on my DEX.

[00:17:32]If those people are able to claim their staking rewards every single block for basically free, then it's just incentivizing them to claim, sell, claim, sell, claim, sell. And it just the entire thing goes down much faster.

[00:17:46]When it comes to something like Bitcoin, if it costs me more money than you know, if I'm making $10 every 10 minutes in yield for providing liquidity and it costs me $2 to make a Bitcoin transaction, uh I'm probably going to keep my money staked for longer and longer and longer until I have to make a pointed decision to um to make my move and make my trade.

[00:18:08]And that, I think, keeps that amount of friction is really good for uh DeFi specifically. And that extends to towards also That was That's a really basic DeFi example, but there's a lot of other DeFi protocols I think would be super super best served by being in a slower, more expensive environment. It's only really high-frequency trading and perps that I think Bitcoin can't really handle. Um but that stuff can be put on secondary layers, I think. For sure. So, with all of these different faucets in growing DeFi on Bitcoin, what are some of the pieces that you and the team are focused on the most in the next 6 months towards 2027? Yeah, I mean, I think that like increasing the amount of integration adoption for the protocol is crucial for us. Getting into more wallets, getting more exchanges supporting the asset standard, um bringing in more bridging infrastructure to allow more liquidity to flow in easier.

[00:19:02]Um that's one of our main focuses. And the second focus is just continuously improving and building better and better DeFi apps.

[00:19:09]Um increasing sort of our market share.

[00:19:12]You know, we have a great DEX, we have a great uh liquidity farming protocol.

[00:19:16]Uh I think again, we we really want to get to the point where lending on Bitcoin in Aave style lending protocol is 100% viable. I think that's a one-year vision.

[00:19:26]Um so that's really where we want to get to. It's very exciting. Would love to see Aave on Bitcoin. And it's becoming, you know, the new the new version of a bank.

[00:19:35]>> Yeah. But uh we need a Bitcoin bank.

[00:19:37]100%. I mean, there's no reason why that shouldn't happen. I think that there are really fun things that can happen also in the future. You know, you can tokenize stocks, trade against Bitcoin.

[00:19:46]You can have verifiable credentials on Bitcoin where you have like a decentralized identity protocol where only qualified investors can trade certain assets. You can tokenize real estate on Bitcoin, trade your Bitcoin against it. Um you can take a loan out against your uh house in BD C all on chain, fully decentralized. Like there's You can get to these crazy things that are not so crazy in the non-Bitcoin world, but I just don't think there's as much product market fit on a random RWA chain as there [clears throat] would be on a chain like Bitcoin that everyone has access to, everyone knows. It's there's this sort of issue, I think, with crypto in general where if you're onboarding a brand new user, you have to sell them on the concept of Bitcoin, get them to understand that, and then be like, "Oh, and now here's this like 50 other blockchains that all do these random hyper-specialized things."

[00:20:30]There's not like a huge reason for most of these to exist, in my opinion.

[00:20:33]>> It's always we got to sell you on Bitcoin first, and then you got to figure out Ethereum and all these other chains, and they're all completely different. Yeah. And Bitcoin could just do everything. [laughter] Makes sense.

[00:20:42]>> Yeah. So that's super exciting. Um what's the best way to learn more about the yields and check out the the Moto Swap and the ecosystem?

[00:20:51]>> Yeah, so motoswap.org is where you can play. Um defisloth.com is where you can kind of like track yields. There's a bunch of cool portfolio managing uh and yield tracking uh tooling that the community has made.

[00:21:04]Um opnet.org is where you can really kind of learn everything you need to know. We have docs, everything's fully open source there, and that's where you can kind of like there's like a get started guide that you can just kind of jump in from there. So, opnet.org, motoswap.org, and if there's a bunch of cool analytics stuff. So, I would I would recommend just get involved with the community.

[00:21:22]There's a pretty pretty tight-knit community that we formed over the course of the past few years as we've been building this out.

[00:21:29]And they're highly autistic, so be ready for that. Awesome. Thank you so much, Samuel. Appreciate the insights into Bitcoin.

[00:21:38]Best of luck in in growing the Bitcoin ecosystem. I appreciate it. I I agree.

[00:21:42]We need more value and functionality to the greatest and strongest asset that's ever been created in the world. I agree, man. I mean, Why else are we here, you know?

[00:21:52]>> [laughter] >> Why else are we here? Yeah. It can't be, in my opinion, it can't just be banks and governments, and they just own Bitcoin, and that's that's the future of CBDC. I think that there's a there's a much brighter and like a golden path for for Bitcoin. Yeah.