BTC is quietly entering DeFi, but most people haven't seen the real bottleneck yet The matter of BTC entering DeFi has been happening for the past year, but most people haven't taken it seriously. As of Q1 2026, BTCFi's TVL is around 8 billion US dollars, with an annual growth rate of nearly 200%. Babylon's pledged BTC+wBTC+tBTC+cbBTC, as well as BounceBit, Stacks, Merlin, BOB, Bitlayer, and a pile of BTC L2 each have a block of liquidity. But BTC cannot see each other, Ethereum is different. ETH has LayerZero, Wormhole, and CCIP, and its cross chain assets are relatively mature; BTC is really broken here, wBTC is on Ethereum, cbBTC is on Base, tBTC is on Arbitrarum, native BTC is on Babylon, and they are completely different tokens on different chains. I want to exchange wBTC for cbBTC on Curve, with a combination of sliding points, bridge fees, and confirmation time. The experience will be similar to DeFi in 2020. This is the real bottleneck of BTCFi. It's not that the returns are not high enough, it's that liquidity is simply not available. To get up, BTCFi will inevitably have an interoperability layer that aggregates all BTC assets, all chains, and all protocols. @PersistenceOne is one of the few serious efforts in this field. Their BridgeKitty does a very specific job: aggregating BTC assets and stablecoins to find the optimal cross chain path. When a user places an order, the backend automatically splits the link, compares quotes, and takes the cheapest bridge. More interestingly, it serves not only people, but also agents. This is another underestimated trend. On chain agents have completely different behavior patterns from humans, including automatic market making, cross chain arbitrage, and fund routing. 24-hour running, sensitive to slip points, and more sensitive to delays. An aggregation layer that can be used by both humans and agents will have a much steeper demand curve than pure To C. BridgeKitty just released a major upgrade yesterday, with focus on path optimization and agent integration. My judgment: 1. This wave of BTCFi is not a BTC L2 battle, the more L2 there is, the more valuable the aggregation layer is. 2. However, the cross chain aggregation track is narrow. In 2026, over 40% of DeFi traffic will be driven by AI agents, with competitors including LiFi, Socket, and Across. Whether Persistence can establish barriers in the BTCFi segment depends on how many agent call volumes can be generated. 3. The entry point of Persistence is very clever. What it is actually doing is intention oriented aggregation. For users, they don't need to worry about whether the underlying layer is using the official bridge of Across or Stacks, as long as the result is the best quote