Bitcoin is the perfect settlement layer to build apps on top of: Hiro CEO

Although the Bitcoin network is not programmable, it serves as an excellent settlement layer to build robust applications on top of, says Hiro CEO Alex Miller.

Hiro provides Bitcoin development tools for developers to build on the Stacks blockchain. Miller said Stacks inherit the Bitcoin network’s security through a consensus mechanism called proof-of-transfer (although this is a controversial statement for some).

Miller told Cointelegraph that the value proposition behind building programs on top of Bitcoin is that it’s a “really well-settled, well-accepted, very reliable settlement layer.”

He added that because of this, it is a much simpler blockchain to build on top of compared to most other smart contract platforms that do computation and settlement at the same layer:

“When you have both your settlement and your calculation on the same team, it really complicates things in a lot of ways. […] You don’t want to modify your settlement layer that much.”

It enables developers to “do more innovation faster” on a tier two that “has far, far more robust capabilities.”

Miller argued that we shouldn’t be surprised that developers are making Bitcoin programmable, since that’s what Satoshi Nakomoto envisioned:

“Satoshi himself wrote back in 2010, 2011 that he predicted multiple teams [and] additional chains will be built on top of this, to provide all that kind of programmability.”

Miller said that the Stacks developer ecosystem has grown rapidly since the launch of the platform in January 2021, “we have hundreds of developers working in the ecosystem, and thousands of smart contracts and applications that have been deployed on it.”

In the first year after launch, the Stacks blockchain achieved more than 350 million monthly API requests, 40,000 Hiro wallet downloads and implemented 2,500 Clarity smart contracts, with these numbers increasing further in 2022.

Miller also said that we will live in a “multi-chain future” with no particular smart contract platform making decisions at all. “Ethereum is going to be around for at least a while, but there are a lot of other smart contract platforms out there that haven’t stood the test of time yet,” he said.

Related: Stacks’ Mitchell Cuevas talks about building integrated DeFi bridges for Bitcoin users

As for where the crypto market is headed, Miller said crypto volatility will decrease as crypto applications become more “accepted, integrated and used in our society,” adding:

“[By] By bringing programmability and smart contracts to Bitcoin, it helps drive further use of Bitcoin as both a technical and economic layer in our society, thereby reducing volatility while increasing its price over the long term.