It is with a heavy heart that we announce we are winding down the Botanix network.
This decision is the hardest one we have made in four years, and we want to share the reasoning openly because the people who backed us, built with us, and used what we shipped deserve more than a quiet shutdown notice.
First off, an immediate practical consideration for the Botanix community: please withdraw your Bitcoin and other assets before July 9th, 2026.
When we started in 2022, the pitch was simple enough to say in a sentence: bring real utility to Bitcoin. What that actually meant in practice, and what we have spent nearly four years building toward, was more ambitious than that sentence made it sound. We were trying to build a Bitcoin-based blockchain that could find genuine product-market fit as a platform for Bitcoin applications, without using token incentives to drive growth, manufacture users, or simulate utility. Almost every chain that has launched in the last cycle has reached for the same playbook (issue a token without PMF, engineer the incentive surface, point at the resulting metrics), and we did not believe this route is a viable strategy in the long term. We wanted to know whether a Bitcoin chain could earn its users on the strength of what was built on top of it, the value it brings in the market with Bitcoin itself as the only meaningful economic primitive in the system.
And we built it. The Spiderchain went live and stayed live, a year of mainnet operation with one hundred percent uptime and zero security incidents on a genuinely novel cryptographic architecture. We built Dynafed, a dynamic federation that turned the Spiderchain from a static multisig set into a rotating, decentralized one, the technical milestone that most people in this space said could not be built on Bitcoin without compromising trust assumptions. Twenty-five million transactions, two hundred thousand wallets, and tens of millions of dollars in assets moved across the chain, every single number of that earned organically without a token, without airdrops, without points programs, or any of the manufactured-demand machinery. Chainlink, Morpho, GMX, Dolomite, Fireblocks, Alchemy, Galaxy, OKX Wallet, all integrated. We shipped a Bitcoin neobank with BINK on iOS and Android, with self-custodial email login for Bitcoin (something that had never existed before), native Bitcoin yield, and the lowest borrowing rates against Bitcoin anywhere in the world, all of it downstream of owning the infrastructure. The point of saying this is not to argue with our own conclusion. The protocol works, the product works, and our team and ecosystem worked in concert to do exceptional work.
We have run this experiment in earnest, with a working protocol, real applications, and a serious team, for over a year on mainnet and nearly four years in total. The honest answer we have arrived at, after living inside it every day, is that it did not work, at least not in this market and not on this timeline.
We want to share what we think we learned, with the caveat that some of this is conviction and some of this is still suspicion, and we would rather be transparent about the difference than pretend to have clarity we do not have.
The first thing I've had to sit with is timing. Bitcoin utility, making Bitcoin programmable, productive, and integrated into real financial activity, isn't where the real world users sit right now. The conversation is still on Bitcoin as a reserve asset, on its monetary and political positioning, on base-layer conservatism. Those questions are upstream of the ones a Bitcoin L2 needs people to be asking. I still believe Bitcoin gets there, but belief in the destination is not the same as being able to predict when, and nobody can. It's also possible the destination never materialises at all, and that Bitcoin's role as a reserve asset is simply where it settles. If that's true, there will never be a market for what we were building, and no amount of time or capital would change that.
The second is the token question. We intended to eventually launch a token. We saw it, and still see it, as a genuinely new form of equity, something closer to an IPO than an airdrop, to be done when you reach product market fit and the moment is right. That moment never came. What became clear over the last year is that the market largely stopped rewarding even the more considered versions of that playbook. Token launches across the board have broadly underperformed, and those that did go to market with tokens haven't seen the outcomes or PMF that the model is supposed to produce.
The third lesson is about where DeFi demand on Bitcoin actually lives. For most use cases that exist today, lending, yield, leveraged exposure, WBTC on a mature general-purpose L2 is genuinely sufficient. Users have voted with their behaviour, and the verdict is that the trust assumptions of a wrapped representation on Ethereum are acceptable to almost everyone who wants Bitcoin-denominated DeFi. Decentralisation matters to people in principle and in conversation; in practice, when something cheaper and easier is in front of them, they use it. The security case for a dedicated Bitcoin L2 is real, but it only matters for a narrower band of applications than our thesis required, one of the clearer lessons this market has taught us.
The fourth lesson is structural. The on-chain economy is consolidating around venues that own the user relationship: Hyperliquid, Robinhood, the major CEXes, and now TradFi participants absorbing an ever-larger share of attention, flow, and revenue. Convenience and institutional credibility win, every time, as soon as they're available. As retail participation thins, that concentration only deepens. We were, and still are, believers in decentralisation, but the current direction of on-chain growth is running through distribution, and any team building base-layer infrastructure today is rowing upstream against that current. We were no exception.
The fifth lesson is the most concrete. Both of the above played out directly in our economics. The users we attracted were primarily using Bitcoin as a store of value for yield, a legitimate use case, but not the high-frequency transaction volume that drives fee revenue on a network like ours. BINK was our answer to that: a Bitcoin neobank designed to bring daily usage of BTC and stablecoins on-chain, driving the transaction volume the network needed. It was the right strategic instinct, and one we never got the chance to fully test. BINK only landed on both app stores in the last few weeks, a product that by its nature could only be built once the underlying infrastructure was proven and live. When users choose the convenient option and economic gravity pulls toward distribution, what's left on a decentralised infrastructure layer is a user base that costs more to serve than it generates. Infrastructure costs are what they are, and the fee income never came close to covering them.
If you would like to see how we were imagining a Bitcoin future and what we have been working on since September, feel free to download BINK and give it a spin: it’s a full-fledged self-custodial Bitcoin Neobank with email login, one click borrowing, a Lightning integration and more.
App store:
Play store:
This UX is where we think Bitcoin is ultimately heading towards although it feels too early. You can use invite code 1SD31R, but remember to remove your funds by July 9th.
We could keep going. We have chosen not to, however, because continuing past the point where additional time stops producing additional learning is not conviction, it is something that looks like conviction from the outside while corroding into something else on the inside. We would rather stop now, with integrity intact and resources available to take care of the people who took a chance on us, than push the experiment past the point where it still has something to teach us.
Reminder: Please withdraw all your assets by July 9th. After this, the federation will sweep the remaining Bitcoin. Any other assets or tokens on the network from then onwards will unfortunately be unrecoverable.
After this, the federation will sweep the remaining Bitcoin. Any other assets or tokens on the network from then onwards will unfortunately be unrecoverable.
To our investors, who backed a thesis that was harder to defend than it should have been, to our partners who built alongside us and bet pieces of their own roadmaps on ours, to the developers who deployed on Spiderchain, to our users and the BINK community who showed up for something experimental and stayed, and most of all to the Botanix team who shipped a genuinely novel system with rigour and care and who made every hard day worth the difficulty: Thank you, more than the words available here can carry.
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At Meta, 90% of my coworkers were Chinese, and non-Chinese were routinely excluded, disadvantaged, and targeted for layoffs. 6 out of the 7 layoffs I observed targeted non-Chinese despite non-Chinese being the vast minority. Certain orgs like ads and MRS are notorious for being Chinese dominated. I think Americans would be outraged if they knew that their own citizens were getting marginalized and laid off at their own companies, while Chinese promote themselves up, conquer entire orgs, and reap millions.
Imagine if Huawei in Shenzhen had entire orgs and leadership chains completely dominated by Japanese people who brazenly spoke Japanese at work without a care in the world that their Chinese coworkers don't understand, imposed their own work culture without respecting Chinese culture, excluded the Chinese, and laid off Chinese people while promoting their own. I imagine Chinese citizens would be outraged, and never allow that to happen in the first place.
The most blatant and obvious way that non-Chinese are excluded is that Chinese primarily speak Mandarin at work. I'm not talking about one-off conversations, I'm talking about every single conversation. Loudly and brazenly with no respect for others. 10+ teammates and leaders having a group conversation in Mandarin while the 2 non-Chinese don't understand and feel excluded from the team. Although everyone at least has the decency to speak English during formal meetings with a non-speaker present, it was common that right after the meeting ended everyone would immediately switch to Mandarin.
Funny I'm in Korea right now and was just on a double date with 3 other Koreans, and I was shocked that when the conversation would split into two, the other couple would speak to each other in English in my presence just out of respect. A Korean couple on a double-date had the courtesy to speak to each other in English in front of me even though I'd never expect that from them, but my Chinese coworkers did not.
Lunch was another place where non-Chinese were blatantly excluded. Recall that the team I joined was an all Chinese team with only one other non-Chinese person. The Chinese would always get lunch together and never invite us (except for one of them who occasionally would, though at some point stopped). Me and the non-Chinese person would invite them, they'd always refuse, and then shortly after they'd disappear and get lunch together. As a result, it was usually just the two of us getting lunch. (caveat, some of the newer Chinese who joined afterwards also experienced similar treatment. So it's moreso a clique thing than a Chinese vs. non-Chinese thing, though 100% of the clique was Chinese)
On Wednesdays and Fridays I'd often be the only non-Chinese person on my team in the office, and they'd all get lunch together without inviting me. It was depressing, and made me not want to come into the office on those days.
One team dinner we went to a Korean BBQ. I arrived with a non-Chinese coworker and the first table was full, so we sat at one end of the next empty table. Shortly after one of the Tech Leads walked in, and sat at the complete opposite end of our table, alone and not in talking distance to anyone. We invited her over, and she declined. Later another Tech Lead came in and sat across from her. Non-Chinese and Chinese at opposite ends of a long table at a team dinner, and they refused to sit with us. Eventually more people came and the TLs joined our side because I guess maybe it was too obviously anti-social, and they spent the entire dinner speaking speaking Chinese to each other. These were our tech leads.
I could not understand how Meta could have "Tech Leads" that so blatantly excluded teammates. I thought Tech Leads were supposed to uplift the team, and that Meta would hold tech leads to a higher standard.
Now someone might say that it's just lunch or a one-off team dinner, who cares? To that I vehemently disagree. Lunch is extremely important for team bonding, and so much information is transferred through informal socializing. I'm not saying that everyone needs to get lunch together everyday, but if a minority of people are excluded from getting lunch with the rest of the team, and especially the most tenured and senior employees, then naturally that minority is going to feel alienated, disadvantaged, and excluded from opportunities. And the very fact that they're excluded from lunch is reflective of being excluded in general.
When 90% of an org and the entire leadership chain is dominated by one ethnicity, naturally their work culture is going to spill through. Chinese culture is completely different from American work culture, and learning to navigate that was a huge obstacle for me. For example I'm the type that tends to question everything and isn't afraid to challenge a "superior", but I quickly realized that my TL seemed to take offense to that, and would punish/retaliate me for it.
I want to make it clear - I have nothing against Chinese people. Most of them are very kind (strong correlation between kindness and not engaging in the kind of exclusionary behavior I mentioned above), and I have many good friends who are Chinese. I get that some barely speak English (though I question how they got hired). I do genuinely believe that most are good people, and not deliberately trying to exclude others. But regardless of intent, the result is that non-Chinese get excluded. The fact that 6 of the 7 layoffs I observed were not Chinese in a 80-90% Chinese dominated org is testament to this. The fact that 90% Chinese dominated orgs even exist in the first place is testament to this.
I might not even be posting about this given the sensitivity of the topic if not for the fact that I've seen and/or heard stories of some very toxic people who I do not believe would otherwise survive if not for their ability to exclude others, throwing others under the bus for the next layoff. The same people do this over and over again, and get away with it because they're part of the "clique" that essentially has immunity.
I think the company needs to take this more seriously. Some ideas would be enforcing English at the office (I've heard of other teams that do this), raising leaders to a higher bar when it comes to team inclusivity (eg. under the "People" axis), investigating potential discrimination cases (eg. layoffs and/or mistreatment disproportionally affecting certain groups) and having a zero tolerance policy around that, having a zero tolerance policy around injustice in general (eg. lying or deliberately throwing somebody under the bus), ensuring more diverse teams, etc.
But to be honest, I don't have faith that much would change so long as the entire leadership chain up to the VP level is dominated by the same ethnicity, language, and culture. Nor does it seem that leadership even remotely cares given that this has been happening in the HQ for probably at least the last decade, and is obvious to anyone who's stepped foot in the office.
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