Two years ago, at the height of the Bitcoin L2 “literary renaissance,” a frenzy of battles among hundred-chain ecosystems emerged across niche tracks.
Two years later, this batch of BTC L2 institution chains has nearly vanished. After a full cycle, the top leader still at the table is Stacks.
As the oldest-established BTC sidechain/L2, <t-2/>’s mainnet has been running steadily for nearly six years. The ecosystem niche as the leader on the Stacks chain has been dominated for a long time by <t-2/>.
According to Defillama data, Zest’s deposit peak has reached $100M+. Its current protocol TVL is $74.73 million, accounting for as much as 84.7% of Stacks’ total cross-chain TVL.
Zest’s core business is lending, and it has almost monopolized the lending market on the Stacks chain. What’s worth watching is that Zest is repositioning the protocol as a Bitcoin capital layer, beginning to extend its reach into downstream derivative business—creating a BTC collateral vault and turning idle BTC into productive yield-generating assets.
The technical logic behind the interest-bearing collateral vault is very much to the taste of bitcoin OGs: no need for wrapping, no need to deposit into pools, and no custodianship—just a constrained self-custody mechanism.
You can think of it simply like this: users first send BTC into a Taproot UTXO vault on Bitcoin L1, and then, via pre-signing, lock down the spending path. On the target chain (e.g., Ethereum), generate a collateral proof vaultBTC. Use that collateral proof to collateralize and borrow. After the loan is settled, when the time lock expires, the funds can be withdrawn unconditionally.
Recently, Zest has consistently prioritized Bitcoin Collateral Vaults as its top priority. Today it finally went live with a mainnet demo. However, there is currently a deposit limit (a single wallet can deposit at most 0.001 BTC). Once the product is rolled out more broadly, Zest’s TVL should take another step up.
I also checked Zest’s native token market cap: it’s not very high—$26 million in circulating market value. It’s been listed on bn alpha and in contracts. You could add Stacks and Zest to your watchlist for now, and wait for the winds to change in the Bitcoin ecosystem track.
That’s all.
#Stacks $ZEST