Manifesto
Sixteen years ago, Bitcoin introduced something radical: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. At the time it sounded like science fiction, but today it’s a trillion-dollar asset. It’s held by institutions, written about in central bank reports, and debated on Senate floors. Everyone knows what Bitcoin is; whether they use it or not, they know it’s real. That alone makes it one of the most successful pieces of software ever written.
But while Bitcoin has wildly succeeded as a monetary asset (a decentralized store of value nobody can inflate), it hasn’t become the medium of exchange many envisioned early on. People do move Bitcoin, but on the scale of global payments it’s a footnote. Transactions are slow and expensive: a basic transfer can take thirty minutes and cost real money. That’s intentional. Efforts to scale have included larger blocks, sidechains and second layers, but each added more complexity.
The most well-known effort, Lightning, proved you can move Bitcoin quickly and cheaply without breaking its core trust guarantees. However, Lightning alone cannot scale to billions of users: its cumbersome UX, fragmented liquidity and high wallet-creation costs pose significant barriers.
Meanwhile, stablecoins took off by solving a real problem rather than adhering to original visions or philosophical purity. People want money that doesn’t fluctuate daily, that they can send, store and build with, and that settles instantly anywhere in the world.
For developers, stablecoins became a superpower. A few lines of code enable wallets in any country and power new applications—marketplaces, savings tools, creator payouts—without permission or bank interactions. Stablecoins transformed crypto from a speculative asset into a functional financial rail, moving more value today than PayPal.
Yet none of this stablecoin activity occurs on Bitcoin, since it was not designed for such expressiveness and lacks the smart-contract capabilities of other networks.
Still, Bitcoin’s network remains the most resilient primitive: over 200 million users, more than 60 percent of crypto liquidity, and a transcendent brand. Developers will continue building on Bitcoin long after other networks fade.
Today we introduce Spark, a Bitcoin-native Layer 2 for payments and settlement. No bridges, no custodians, only a lightweight signing protocol that makes digital cash, whether BTC or stablecoin, truly usable.
Spark returns to first principles by enabling native applications on Bitcoin. First, it delivers the best UX ever seen on Bitcoin: whether for wallets, games or marketplaces, it offers the fastest, simplest and cheapest rails in crypto. Second, it unlocks new primitives such as stablecoins directly on Bitcoin as native, scalable, self-custodial assets rather than through wrappers or bridges.