If Bitcoin gets smart contracts, does that mean there's no room left for Ethereum or Solana?
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If Bitcoin gets smart contracts, does that mean there's no room left for Ethereum or Solana?
Is that really the case?
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Mu Mu
Over the past year, Bitcoin's ecosystem has developed rapidly. When many people heard that Bitcoin now has "smart contracts," their eyes lit up: "If Bitcoin—the undisputed king in consensus and network strength—now supports smart contracts, doesn't that make Ethereum, Solana, and other public chains obsolete?" This view is widespread and supported by many newcomers and even some financial KOLs. But is this really true?
Bitcoin Maximalism
"There are only two types of cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin and shitcoins." Bitcoin maximalists have held this view unchanged for years. While they remain satisfied with their stance, critics often mock it.
The reason behind such stubborn conviction lies in the fact that Bitcoin has never failed since its inception. Through bull and bear cycles, Bitcoin has repeatedly proven itself as the ultimate survivor—a repeatedly validated reality that commands respect and fosters a deep belief that Bitcoin’s direction is always correct.
Given that, if powerful Bitcoin could natively support smart contracts, couldn’t it directly deploy DApps? Why would we need Ethereum at all? And Solana wouldn’t stand a chance! This logic seems entirely sound.
Some argue that Ethereum and Solana represent generations of technological innovation and should be embraced. But Bitcoin maximalists have strong counterarguments: "Innovation comes at a cost and often leads to failure."
It's Not That Bitcoin Is Right—It's That Its Direction Is Right
The rejection of innovative projects like Ethereum and Solana by most Bitcoin maximalists may seem reasonable, but it overlooks one crucial point: Bitcoin itself was an innovation when compared to traditional finance or even earlier e-money projects. Aren’t most Bitcoin maximalists benefiting from Bitcoin today precisely because they embraced that innovation back then?
Why, then, are they now unwilling to embrace new innovations? Perhaps it's a mindset of "taking profits and playing it safe." After years of HODLing, enduring ups and downs, they don’t want high-risk innovations to wipe them out overnight. Having seen too many once-promising projects collapse suddenly, they’ve become cautious.
As mentioned before, Bitcoin wasn’t the only digital currency innovation of its time. Many institutions, organizations—even criminal groups—proposed similar concepts, some of which even inspired Satoshi Nakamoto during Bitcoin’s design. Even today, some project teams claim: "Whatever Bitcoin can do, I can do; whatever Bitcoin cannot do, I can still do." In practice, however, these claims amount to nothing.
Has anyone ever considered why only simple Bitcoin emerged from these early projects and achieved sustainable development? The same question applies equally to Ethereum and Solana—why have these innovative projects succeeded and sustained themselves?
Bitcoin gained broad recognition because its core philosophy and direction captured the essential needs of the era. By leveraging incentive mechanisms, it enabled open human participation in large-scale collaboration, creating a bottom-up, decentralized, free, fair, and transparent platform for value storage. This is precisely the original vision of crypto projects.
Among today’s numerous projects, not all uphold the初心 (original intent) of crypto. Some are purely designed to exploit FOMO psychology among VCs and investors. They use manipulative tactics (PUA), arguing that sacrificing a bit of decentralization brings higher efficiency and greater value—after all, making money is what matters—which resonates deeply with many.
The current trend is clear: hearing about the massive pie and high valuations in Layer 1 blockchains, crowds rush in to build more L1s, aiming for bigger investments, grander narratives, and extracting more funds from users. So don’t wonder why so-called "value projects" fail to gain traction. The root cause is a wrong direction—projects driven primarily by profit ultimately extract revenue from users. The wool must come from the sheep.
Crypto exists not because of high performance, efficiency, or replaceable technical specs, but because it delivers decentralization, freedom, fairness, transparency, and real Web3 applications with genuine utility and tangible value. We should focus on applications solving problems that Web2 cannot, and the real, pressing needs they fulfill.
As previously discussed in the article "The Hardest-Ever Profitable Bitcoin Bull Market Is Ending?": In any industry, those who enter without embracing its core values—with a 'get-rich-quick' or 'scalping' mentality—are destined to fail. Even if they initially taste success, the market will eventually bite back. Many have forgotten the original purpose of Bitcoin and the crypto industry. Distorted values ultimately lead to severe misjudgments.
With this simple criterion, you can already distinguish 90% of unethical projects in the market.
Bitcoin’s Ecosystem Growth Doesn’t Mean Ethereum and Solana Can’t Thrive
1) Diverse Needs
Before Ethereum and Solana existed, Bitcoin wasn’t alone—numerous early altcoins were active alongside it. This reflects the market’s demand for diversity. Every project has its own value. We can categorize them into three types:
Digital Gold
Only one project qualifies as digital gold: Bitcoin. Under the global macro environment, the necessity of digital gold needs no further explanation.
Durables
Ethereum and certain sustainable DeFi and Web3 infrastructure and applications solve problems Web2 cannot. When EVM became the standard for most smart contract platforms, Ethereum had already become an indispensable part of Web3. These projects possess long-term value—they are durables.
Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG)
Meme coins store emotional value, but emotions—and many novel concepts—come and go quickly. Like paper products, they have a limited lifecycle. You can’t expect repeated use or long-term value delivery.
The first two categories are suitable for medium- to long-term investment, while the third is meant for one-time use. Holding onto them longer often leads to being trapped.
2) Technological Innovation
The idea of introducing smart contracts into Bitcoin’s ecosystem isn’t new. There were many attempts even in Bitcoin’s early days (e.g., colored coins), and exploration continues to this day.
Early technical bottlenecks made it nearly impossible to introduce powerful smart contracts directly into Bitcoin without abandoning its existing technical roadmap. Had the codebase and direction changed drastically overnight, developers would have fled, destroying today’s robust consensus.
Vitalik Buterin originally proposed bringing smart contracts into the Bitcoin community, but faced opposition from Bitcoin core developers. That’s when he decided to start fresh—leading to the creation of Ethereum.
In recent years, Bitcoin has maintained a steady technical path, while Ethereum has introduced numerous innovations: smart contracts, PoS, EIP-1559, and especially Rollup-based Layer 2 solutions that addressed scalability…
Today, apart from Lightning Network and Stacks, most Bitcoin ecosystem projects directly copy Ethereum’s Rollup technology. Has anyone questioned whether this truly fits?
Take ZK-Rollup as an example. It was originally designed as a Layer 2 solution for smart contract platforms like Ethereum. ZK-Rollups perform computations off-chain, generate zero-knowledge proofs, and submit them to Ethereum for direct verification and settlement. However, Bitcoin itself cannot natively verify zero-knowledge proofs. Some project teams try to force compatibility by adding middleware layers—such as oracles—to bridge the gap. Yet this is akin to taping horns onto a horse’s head and calling it a unicorn.
Bitcoin Itself Will Never Support Smart Contracts
Bitcoin smart contracts are currently just marketing slogans used by related ecosystem projects. These so-called smart contracts are implemented via ecosystem extensions, not by Bitcoin itself. Bitcoin does not support smart contracts today, and is highly unlikely to upgrade to support them in the future. As the saying goes: "You can't have your cake and eat it too." To remain pure digital gold, Bitcoin cannot also be a smart contract platform.
First, the UTXO data structure cannot handle complex state management like Ethereum’s account model. Second, as a smart contract platform, rising fees due to decreasing inflation would make BTC increasingly expensive as transaction gas, thereby increasing costs and suppressing ecosystem growth.
As stated earlier, "Bitcoin smart contracts" refer to smart contracts implemented by Bitcoin-adjacent projects. However, these layered implementations fall short in security, reliability, and even scalability compared to Ethereum’s native ecosystem. Meanwhile, Ethereum remains the largest "exit destination" for Bitcoin—WBTC, tBTC, and Coinbase’s cbBTC are flowing into Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem in various forms. From a layering perspective, Ethereum has effectively become Bitcoin’s largest and most widely adopted sidechain. Indeed, Ethereum’s innovations in scalability, interoperability, and account abstraction have long led the industry, while Bitcoin ecosystem projects merely follow behind, copying its homework.
Conclusion
Bitcoin’s ecosystem, Ethereum’s ecosystem, Solana, and future innovative projects—all are justified in their existence as long as they uphold the original spirit of crypto and create real value around Web3 principles. You take the broad highway, I’ll walk the narrow bridge—everyone can have a bright future.
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