Bankless · Monday, July 20, 2026
Bitcoin Dave discusses Alpen Labs' approach to building a Bitcoin Layer 2 (L2) solution, focusing on a garbled circuits approach and aiming to attract top DeFi protocols and applications. He contrasts this with the broader crypto industry's talent drain to AI, emphasizing Bitcoin's unique position due to its strong monetary thesis and core community.
“So for me, the vibes has never been better. It's like, holy shit, we're freaking doing it, man.”
“And I think for us at Alpen, again, I'm kind of talking my own book, like very early on, we said, either we're able to attract the best and compete for the top, or we just have to wrap up shop and say, you know, we gave it a good fight.”
“Our EVM will be called just Alpen EVM. Underneath that, we haven't really announced this, but this layer that I kind of compared to Celestia's ZK accounts will be called Strata.”