When we compare the top two blockchains, Bitcoin and Ethereum, we usually talk about the price of BTC vs ETH, market caps, institutional interest indicated by ETF flows, and crypto treasury companies.
However, the real way these cryptocurrencies lead the crypto market is not through their price action, but through their technology. The growing value of Bitcoin and Ethereum and their top spots in the crypto rankings are directly related to their revolutionary, complex, and time-tested designs.
A duality of blockchains
What makes the paired dominance of Ethereum and Bitcoin especially interesting is that they represent two different approaches to blockchain technology. Other cryptocurrencies, hundreds of them, all imitate either Bitcoin or Ethereum to some extent. Those that introduce significant innovations, like zero knowledge proofs, are still based on Ethereum’s design. Of course, the creation of Ethereum itself was in turn inspired by Bitcoin.
Bitcoin’s original purpose was to enable decentralized, trustless, and secure payments – a simple idea, difficult to accomplish, effectively executed. Bitcoin laid the basis for all cryptocurrencies that came after, but it wasn’t yet concerned with any applications that might run on a blockchain. Now, nearly 20 years later, Bitcoin is adding features that will allow it to be more like Ethereum – specifically, token and contract support, and even full EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) integration.
It’s worth noting that the first attempts to create tokens on Bitcoin preceded the launch of Ethereum in 2015, so it wouldn’t be fair to say that Bitcoin is just trying to imitate Ethereum’s DeFi success. Why have Bitcoin DeFi innovations intensified in the last couple of years? Let’s take a closer look at the Bitcoin-Ethereum relationship.
What is changing for Bitcoin
Bitcoin was launched in 2008, and for 15 years its function remained unchanged and its security undeniable. Fans called it digital gold, detractors called it a pet rock, but it came down to the same thing – Bitcoin could be relied on as a payments network and a store of value, which is saying a lot in the volatile crypto space.
Two factors in Bitcoin’s design have contributed to its growing price: the hard cap of 21 million Bitcoin, which means eventually no new Bitcoin will be created, and the Bitcoin halving, which cuts the mining reward for new blocks by half about every 4 years, slowing down the issue of Bitcoin until the hard cap is reached.
Ironically, the same design features that give Bitcoin scarcity and value may now be creating challenges for its security. As the reward for producing new BTC is reduced and mining difficulty increases, it may become unprofitable for miners. If they abandon Bitcoin for more promising blockchain yields, Bitcoin could end up being supported by fewer nodes and mining power could become more centralized, compromising the security and resilience of the network. Aside from this, Bitcoin critics have always pointed to problems with scalability and usability, especially in light of competition from proliferating EVM networks and Layer 2s.
With the attention of traditional finance and institutional investors turning increasingly toward blockchain solutions, Ethereum is winning the race. At time of writing, over 90 percent of tokenized RWAs (Real World Assets), including stablecoins and tokenized stocks, are based on Ethereum and EVM-compatible chains. The advantages of programmable DeFi are becoming harder to ignore and the considerable value locked in Bitcoin, which has a market cap almost five times that of Ethereum, is too tempting to leave untapped.
Should Bitcoin become like Ethereum?
In the discussion of Bitcoin’s future, two considerations stand out: whether it’s possible for Bitcoin to support more DeFi, and whether it’s necessary, or even desirable. The debate about Bitcoin’s purpose has been ongoing since at least 2010, when the EVM was just a glint in its creator’s eye.
It’s important to understand that the constraints of Bitcoin’s programming language have been deliberate – in many ways, its simplicity has been its value proposition. Over the years, changes to Bitcoin’s original design, like Lightning Network and federated sidechains, have largely failed to live up to Bitcoin’s technical standards and user expectations.
Recent developments seem to show more promise, but also garner more controversy. In September 2025, a big upgrade to the Bitcoin BRC-20 protocol, called BRC2.0, brought full EVM compatibility to Bitcoin. Before this, Bitcoin tokens worked differently than those on Ethereum or Layer 2s, limiting the interoperability of DeFi applications, and making it more difficult for EVM developers to apply their work to Bitcoin.
Arriving just a few weeks later, an October 2025 update to Bitcoin Core protocol called Core v30 allows transactions to carry much larger amounts of non-payment data like messages, proofs, and files without affecting the BTC transfers themselves. While this makes sense in the context of making Bitcoin more programmable, critics are concerned that attaching more data to transactions will lead to blockchain bloat and open the door to spam and illegal content.
Alongside these changes, the Bitcoin ecosystem is attracting more teams working on ZK (zero knowledge) rollup solutions, with the goal of making Bitcoin DeFi privacy focused right from the start, and Bitcoin Layer 2 networks like Starknet, which just introduced self-custodial BTC staking.
Overall, there is a lot to gain from more DeFi on Bitcoin. BTC value will no longer have to move offchain and introduce new layers of custodians and intermediaries to participate in DeFi. Increased composability with EVM will allow the ecosystem to grow in a way that had never been possible before. An increased volume of DeFi transactions and, therefore, increased transaction fees may give Bitcoin more options to incentivize miners.
On the other hand, the opponents of the changes also have strong arguments. Because Bitcoin’s security, scarcity, and immutability are the main drivers behind its value, any changes to Bitcoin’s protocol potentially put its sustainability and price at risk. If investors lose faith in Bitcoin and its price crashes, all other considerations about Bitcoin DeFi become less salient.
The future of BTC vs ETH
The crypto space has more than its fair share of maxis who proclaim that only one blockchain or cryptocurrency is the ‘best one’ that will ‘kill’ all the other cryptos. However, the reality is that different blockchain models offer different advantages, and no one can say what use cases and technologies will emerge as the dominant ones in the next years and decades (no matter what the latest Tik Tok or Youtube influencer is telling you). Neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum are going anywhere, and they are not about to be ‘killed’ by any cryptocurrency modeled on their design.
Until Bitcoin achieves a fully functional virtual machine that will allow it to become competitive with Ethereum in decentralized finance applications (if indeed this is the direction Bitcoin will take), many solutions already exist that allow users to put their BTC value into DeFi through bridging, wrapping, swapping, and staking.
Multichain wallets like Enkrypt and MEW further facilitate this approach by making both BTC and ETH accounts available in the same wallet, along with integrated yield opportunities. It has never been more unnecessary to ‘pick a side’ between Bitcoin and Ethereum, and has never been easier to reap benefits from both.
Ultimately, in the rapidly expanding landscape of hybrid finance where decentralized and traditional tools are merging, BTC and ETH remain the dominant ‘blue chip’ cryptos. How much DeFi will be taken on by Bitcoin remains to be seen, but both blockchains will continue to play a central part in accelerating TradFi x DeFi integration and bringing real world assets onchain.
