Why#base链 Has it become the most popular public chain recently?
First, let’s take a look at what has happened on the Base chain recently that is worth noting:
From a data perspective, TVL and Volume both hit new highs, and net capital inflow surpassed Solana
On November 19, Trump met with Coinbase CEO Brian to discuss cryptocurrency policy
Phantom wallet announced support for Base chain yesterday
However, looking back at the BTC ecosystem, in addition to last year’s rune market, the BTCFi protocol led by Babylon has attracted a lot of funds to the chain this year, and the recent rune market seems to have picked up. More importantly, the BTC ecosystem has always been continuously built by a group of friends who persist in their beliefs.
So, how to connect the Base chain and the BTC ecosystem?
“This topic can actually be raised to a higher level, that is, how to connect more VM ecosystems with the BTC ecosystem.”
There is no doubt that connecting the two ecosystems will bring more liquidity, and as users we can more conveniently choose to invest in some of the most popular assets.
CatalystSystem provides the solution as the only bridge designed for alternative virtual machines (altVM).
Allows users to exchange native BTC on the Bitcoin network with any token on a VM blockchain (such as EVM, SVM, Move, etc.)
Simply put, Catalyst's CrossCats can be used to directly convert tokens on the VM into native BTC.
How CrossCats works:
First, CrossCats is an intent-based cross-chain exchange protocol built with flexibility in mind.
The core idea is to allow anyone to create any provable request. At launch, EVM settlements and Bitcoin transactions will be part of the provable set. Bitcoin transactions are verified using a Bitcoin SPV client and allow VM chain payments to be conditional on Bitcoin transactions.
It uses on-chain light clients and cross-chain messaging protocols (such as the familiar wormhole) to optimistically verify transactions.
On November 27, Catalyst Protocol announced the launch of the public beta mainnet. Now you can exchange USDC on the Base chain for native BTC through http://app.crosscats.xyz.
Product experience:
I have also personally experienced CrossCats and found it very simple. Most of the operating logic of CrossCats is based on the source chain, that is, the base chain. I only need to connect to the EVM wallet of the base chain and fill in the Bitcoin address that needs to receive BTC to convert USDC on the base chain into BTC.
I transferred 9 USDC across chains, and the base chain approved the use of USDC, which cost 0.01U of gas. In about ten minutes, the BTC wallet received 0.00007704BTC, which consumed about 1.5U. The whole process was simple and convenient, and very smooth.
It can be said to be groundbreakingly fast and convenient. If the security is verified over a long period of time, CrossCats may be able to change the on-chain behavior patterns of some Web3 users.
Back to the original topic, what will happen if the VM blockchain and BTC ecosystem are connected?
I still start from the user's perspective. First of all, for me, it is more about solving the liquidity of assets. At present, CrossCats has just launched the public beta mainnet, temporarily only supporting the Base chain, and will support more VM blockchains in the future. This means that in the future I can directly cross-chain any asset on the VM chain to the BTC ecosystem, or cross the native BTC of the BTC ecosystem back to participate in the ecosystem.
Many friends also ask questions, why don’t I buy BTC directly from the exchange and transfer it to the BTC chain? Is this a false demand?
If the native BTC is brought to the chain, it will often face congestion on the chain and delays in packaging. In addition, the withdrawal fees of the exchange are more expensive than Crosscats. Opportunities on the chain are usually time-sensitive, so I don’t think this is a false demand.
In addition, Rootdata shows that Catalyst has received $4.2 million in seed round financing, led by Spartan Group.
This amount of financing is not outstanding among many protocols. After all, the entire protocol is still in its early stages. However, I believe that when the Crosscats product supports more popular VM ecosystems in the future, such as Solana, SUI, etc., there will definitely be another large round of financing. Of course, the prerequisite is that the protocol needs to undergo security testing after running for a period of time.
