Today, I am super excited to announce our highly anticipated Botanix Labs testnet is now live! Our public testnet is the first fully decentralized EVM-equivalent Layer 2 on Bitcoin.
Our team has put over a year of research and development into this release, and we centered the user experience in everything we built. We want to make it as easy as possible to start building on Bitcoin.
In a multichain world, it has become abundantly clear that EVM is the winning virtual machine - not just for use on Ethereum but on any chain. EVM’s tooling, support and vibrant developer community make it the natural aggregator for programmability. At the same time, as Bitcoiners, we started to wonder - could Bitcoin scale from being the best money ever made to powering the basis of a new financial system?
Our team was initially united by a love for bitcoin: I met my cofounder, Armin, at a Boston BitDevs event. We became obsessed with the logic and technology of Bitcoin, both as a unit of money and a framework for building the future of finance. We want to build the infrastructure to realize this vision, and make Bitcoin the centerpiece for a decentralized global economy.
We welcome everyone to try our testnet and give us feedback via this form and follow and tag us on X @botanixlabs if you start building!
We are particularly excited to help incubate a thriving Bitcoin-enabled DeFi and NFT ecosystem. Our testnet includes a faucet for Signet bitcoin, a bridge, and the first-ever PancakeSwap-like fork for swapping tokens, AvocadoSwap 🥑.
We are also selecting 10 startups to participate in our Botanix Testnet Accelerator for enhanced BD support, co-marketing and development resources as we rev up to the mainnet launch next year. Startups will be selected based on product built, transaction activity and business case. Please reach out to our team if you have any questions on this program. Developers first, always 💛
LFG 🚀
Willem Schroé, Founder of Botanix Labs
P.S. Be sure to join our community and connect with us in Discord and Telegram.