Focusing on Bitcoin will pay great dividends, says Portal CMO

Portal DeFi has recently been introduced as a decentralised financial platform that “blends the best” of Bitcoin and Layer 2 solutions.

Coin Rivet spoke to its co-founder and chief marketing officer, George Burke, who explained the symbiosis of Bitcoin and Layer 2 by describing Bitcoin acting as a “base layer money” that can create huge dividends.

Burke said so-called ‘layered’ applications that periodically settle high economic density transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain are “the future we’ll see”.

The Portal platform facilitates swaps and moves provable execution of cross chain contracts to Layers 2/3, which enables the same speed and liquidity of centralised platforms.

Also, with Portal, clients can benefit from the trust minimisation guarantees of Bitcoin.

Moreover, transactions are a lot faster and cheaper with Portal when compared to Layer 1 transactions and these are some of the main reasons why BTC transactions could become even more useful and powerful in the future.

“These layered applications are usually purpose driven: ‘Lightning’ for peer-to-peer micro payments, ‘Portal’ for crosschain exchange, etc.” Burke added.

“For Bitcoin to succeed, we need many more layered applications that serve a variety of use cases for the broadest possible audience.”

With Portal, Burke says DeFi could become truly un-censorable, while enabling peer-to-peer and trust minimised services.

Just like the underlying properties of the BTC protocol, Portal aims to provide a secure foundation for facilitating non-custodial digital asset trading.

He stated the company sees “tremendous interest in financial applications that utilise the properties of the Bitcoin blockchain”.

“The good news is that the crypto space is rich with capital and poor in product/protocol market fit,” he said.

“We find ourselves in a very fertile environment where focusing on the right space (Bitcoin), and having consistency and discipline as a company will pay great dividends.”

When talking about government blowback, Burke commented he is not afraid of government blowback for himself but added he believes that governments will, at some point, try to attack Bitcoin to preserve their monetary sovereignty.

“A cursory analysis of the risk/benefit calculus of the biggest nation-states makes this obvious.”

Burke also went on to describe CBDCs as a surveillance nightmare that will extinguish whatever little monetary freedom citizens have.

“They are a dystopian tool that will make financial oppression that much easier and more painful,” he said.

“We predict, given the course governments have been on, that they will all take wrong lessons from China and try to emulate their level of social and financial control CBDCs are on a direct collision course with Bitcoin.”

He also added that building Defi on Bitcoin was “the way to go”, saying: “Any other experiment that succeeds in delivering value to users on other blockchains will be rebuilt on Bitcoin, and we likely will play a part in it.”