BTCfi went from roughly $300M in Jan 2024 to a $9.1B peak in Oct 2025. ~22x in 21 months.
The 5-year arc:
– 2021: "BTCfi" meant WBTC on Ethereum and a sleepy Lightning Network
– 2022: bridge hacks (Ronin, Wormhole, Nomad) gutted wrapped-BTC trust
– 2023: Taproot's deferred payoff lands — Ordinals in January, BRC-20 in March drag Bitcoin block usage into fee-paying territory
– 2024: Babylon mainnet (Aug), sBTC (Dec), spot BTC ETFs (Jan), three independent unlocks in one year
– 2025–26: Babylon at $4.1–5.64B, Lombard's LBTC the fastest yield token to $1B in crypto history, Citrea ships the first ZK rollup on Bitcoin
Where it actually sits today:
– 0.46% of all BTC is in DeFi. Ethereum: ~30%
– BTCfi pulled $175M VC across 32 rounds in H1 2025 alone
– Bitcoin L2 TVL collapsed 74% in 2025 while overall BTCfi only dropped 10% — capital rotated out of EVM copycats into native staking and yield primitives
Hougan's $200B addressable number isn't the bull case. It's the floor, that's just 12.5% of BTC's market cap doing what 30% of ETH already does.
The interesting question isn't whether BTCfi grows. It's which architecture wins the trust assumption: federations, BitVM bridges, or covenant-enabled vaults once CTV activates.