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Olá pessoal!
For today’s episode I’m joined by Alisia Painter, who is co-founder and COO of Botanix Labs — which has built a new bitcoin-based blockchain focused on powering the bitcoin economy.
The Botanix mainnet launched on July 1 with the goal of bringing financial products to bitcoin via EVM-compatibility and smart contract programmability.
Alisia’s journey into bitcoin began in Brazil in 2015 when she was working for a Brazilian company in Sao Paulo. She was receiving salary in BRL and discovered bitcoin as a way to protect herself against the depreciating currency while easily remitting funds back to her home country of Canada.
That experience, and later time spent in Asia and Africa, shaped her bitcoin worldview and motivated her to pursue bringing financial use cases and products to bitcoin.
Key Themes from Our Conversation:
Real-world bitcoin use cases: Unlike theoretical discussions, Alicia's perspective comes from seeing actual monetary instability and the urgent need for sound money in developing economies
The Spiderchain innovation: Botanix's unique proof-of-stake blockchain, built on top of Bitcoin's proof-of-work consensus, creates a decentralized network of multi-sigs that enables programmability while maintaining bitcoin's core principles
Cultural shift in bitcoin: The ETF approval has fundamentally changed who bitcoiners are - from hardcore HODLers to mainstream investors buying on Robinhood who want to put their bitcoin to work
EVM equivalence on bitcoin: Developers can copy-paste battle-tested smart contracts from Ethereum directly onto Botanix, bringing DeFi's entire ecosystem to Bitcoin with proven security
Bitcoin's maturation: As bitcoin becomes less volatile and capital gains moderate, the need for financialization and yield generation becomes more critical
Institutional interest: Major financial firms are showing significant interest in Botanix because institutions ultimately denominate everything in Bitcoin
Building the Bitcoin Economy
What makes Botanix particularly compelling is their ecosystem-first approach. Rather than just building infrastructure and hoping developers will come, they've incubated native applications from day one - DEXs like Arch and Bitsy, lending protocols like Dolomite, and even GMX deploying their battle-tested perpetuals platform.
Their vision extends beyond DeFi to imagine a complete bitcoin-based economy, visualized in their creative "2100 Bitcoin World" website - a Simpsons’-themed city where every building represents a different application in their ecosystem.
Brazilian Connections
Throughout our bilingual conversation, Alicia emphasizes the natural fit between bitcoin DeFi and Brazilian markets, noting strong community interest and the presence of Portuguese-speaking resources in their Discord community.
As Botanix launches its mainnet and prepares to introduce yield-bearing bitcoin (STBTC) next month, they're positioning themselves not just as another bitcoin layer-2, but as the foundation for bitcoin's evolution from digital gold to the backbone of a new financial system.
I enjoyed this conversation with Alisia. You can connect with her on X/Twitter and on Linkedin.
-AWS
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