BTC’s 4G Moment

2024 is the year of BTC: the Bitcoin ETF was finally approved by the SEC, the quadrennial halving arrived as scheduled, and if Bitcoin's DeFi applications before 2024 were still limited to anchor coins, then BTC will no longer be satisfied with being the digital gold of the crypto world, but a truly applied asset.

One manifestation is that, driven by the rapid rise of DeFi last year, L2 projects aimed at building new expansion solutions on Bitcoin have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain, and DeFi's TVL has exceeded the 2 billion mark; but at the same time, BTC, which has a similar development path to Ethereum, has also replicated the same problem: L2 is not the holy grail of improving scalability. When the separation of economic activities between protocols becomes an obstacle to blockchain interoperability, the construction of "bridge builders" is inevitably seen as an important part of this change, and DID is an important part of it.

Just as other application-oriented public chains have already developed their own representative DID projects, DID representative service providers on BTC have also emerged like Lifeform. This year, it has completed two rounds of financing with a total valuation of US$400 million. Investment institutions include Binance, IDG Capital, GeekCartel, Foresight Ventures, KuCoin Labs, and SevenX Ventures. The star project has made a lot of moves recently and its voice cannot be ignored.

Why is DID so important? And why do we say that Lifeform is the leader in the current BTC DID track? This article will give you a preliminary explanation of the importance of DID and what Lifeform is doing.

DIDs — the promise of blockchain interoperability

The essence of the network is connection. On the Internet, Sesame Credit has enabled the access to Alibaba's scenarios, but unfortunately, with so many competing companies, most platform data still cannot be circulated and traded to create more value.

Not only is interaction between chains difficult, switching between different smart contracts on a chain and interaction between L1, L2, and L3 are also very limited. It is the existence of these barriers that raises the cognitive and economic threshold of economic activities in the Web3 ecosystem.

DID, the abbreviation of Decentralized Identifiers, is a decentralized identity that came into being as a solution to improve the interoperability of blockchains. It is a management container for identities, certificates, private keys, and assets, and is dedicated to spanning multiple service scenarios and multiple data sources.

Compared with Internet ID, Web3's DID has a natural privacy advantage due to its decentralization. The management rights are handed over to the users, eliminating the data security risks of outsourcing identity management to centralized institutions. Compared with digital currency wallets, DID can integrate multiple on-chain addresses and even multiple wallet accounts, and can even evolve from 2D identity to 3D identity. It has more user portraits and more vivid and three-dimensional identity information. The arrangement and combination of different data makes the application scenarios richer.

An ideal DID should aggregate the addresses of mainstream public chains, integrate users' fragmented data on different chains while having basic signatures, transfers and other transactions; secondly, it should allow users to independently authorize which data to disclose to the project, thereby helping users achieve data sovereignty.

DID — expected to become a super entrance to break through Web3

DID identity is also the key to Web3 breaking the circle.

Especially with the Bitcoin ETF finally approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for the first time in January this year and becoming an official investment product for U.S. dollars, BTC will be embraced by more and more outside funds. According to the latest data, 10 ETFs (excluding Grayscale) led by BlackRock and Fidelity have cumulatively purchased more than 500,000 bitcoins, bringing more than 30 billion U.S. dollars to the industry; correspondingly, although the Web3 protocol is gradually prospering, it is also suffering from the game of existing funds. How to transform these old money that only focuses on BTC into living water for deep participation in Web3?

For the general public who are willing to embrace the crypto world but lack a low-threshold access channel as an opportunity, a sufficiently simple Web3 entrance is the first step in building a good user experience for users outside the circle; in addition, we need this entrance to be as comprehensive as possible and to be able to easily reach multiple Web3 scenarios.

DID has such potential. Compared with projects such as DeFi and GameFi, DID has a low entry threshold and understanding cost, and has a strong Matthew effect. It is expected to become a super entrance for users to enter Web3. Once DID becomes a window for new capital inflows, its identity set will convert non-financial behaviors into reliable reputation values and quantify financial behaviors into credit values. Web3 applications will also usher in revolutionary development.

The full-chain domain name launched by Lifeform opens a door to the world of digital currency for Web2 users, becoming the first Web3 passport for new users. With digital currency assets, you can easily earn high annualized returns without having to master complex blockchain technology knowledge, just one click. With the influx of a large number of new Web2 users in 2024, most of them still don’t know much about the operation of the blockchain world. This part of the funds is looking for an entry point that they are familiar with, and Lifeform provides them with this convenient entry point. As a bridge across Web2 and Web3, Lifeform allows every user to easily manage their finances. With the influx of a large amount of funds, the future development prospects will be unimaginable.

Lifeform: A passport for Web3, adding bricks and tiles to the application building of BTC

Lifeform, which has received investments from a number of star institutions, excels by focusing on the above two goals. Next, let’s take a look at how Lifeform realizes the DID blueprint.

Implement full-chain domain name

Unlike other DID solutions that rely on the characteristics of different public blockchains, which limits their cross-chain capabilities and application scope, Lifeform provides a full-chain domain name .btc service. It is the first All in one domain name resolution platform that supports multiple blockchains (including but not limited to Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB Chain, Solana, Base, Avalanche, OPBNB and other major public chains). The platform has performed Lifeform Universal Domain.btc domain name mapping for domain names such as .eth, .bnb, .sol, .arb, etc., and can realize cross-chain collection, multi-chain asset query, multi-channel integration, interactive social interaction, cross-chain finance and other functions.

In the roadmap, Lifeform also proposed to cooperate with various wallets to connect the .btc domain name SDK to the exchange wallet; as well as plans to support seamless interaction across multiple layer 1 and layer 2 networks.

AI and visualization, breaking the circle of Web3

Lifeform also leverages its AI technology advantages to provide cross-chain activity analysis using artificial intelligence, and provides tailored recommendations for blockchain services, tokens or dApps based on their asset operation behavior profiles.

Especially for users outside the circle who have a large amount of BTC assets but are idle, Lifeform will easily connect them to the BTC L2 protocol, such as the decentralized staking protocol and defi machine pool featuring stable interest, to increase the possibility of obtaining additional income without selling cryptocurrencies.

In the future, Lifeform will also use AI to release various practical smart hardware, such as BTC Mobile, head-mounted display devices, etc., to establish a free and unlimited Bitcoin ecological mobile application store, and provide a full range of mobile solutions for the Bitcoin developer community.

In terms of presentation, Lifeform is also a leader in visual DID. Through a more sophisticated engine, users can simply create any virtual image and link it to Web2 streaming media with one click for dynamic manipulation of the virtual person. Ultimately, the vision of bringing the next 1 billion users into Web3 will be realized. Users will not only have their own unique full-chain identity and social space, but in the near future, they will be able to travel through the AR/XR world with Universal Domain through smart hardware.

Summary: Lifeform may usher in a revolutionary moment for BTC

In short, in the future, BTC and Lifeform will complement each other and achieve each other's success.

As Lifeform builds more bridges, BTC has the potential to become a simpler, faster, fairer, and more trusted environment to build on.

As for Lifeform, with the high recognition of BTC, the earliest blockchain network with the highest market value, its services will face a broader market and opportunities.

In the future, BTC will also usher in a truly borderless user ecosystem centered on credit/reputation: Defi may usher in a world of low-collateral or even uncollateralized credit loans, giving birth to more credit financial products; and higher-level and simpler social service behaviors, such as chatting, credit rating, personal achievement display, etc., will also build a mature on-chain social network comparable to Web2 in scale; Web3 applications such as GameFi, NFT and DAO will also have a different future in the BTC ecosystem.

In the future, as the frequency and complexity of user on-chain operations increase, and with the continuous development and progress of cryptography and Web3 technology, we can expect Lifeform to become a key hub and underlying infrastructure connecting BTC and even Web3 assets, applications, and services.