2025 Bitcoin L2 Landscape: Who Is Breaking Through?

When it comes to the hottest BTC narratives, L2 definitely ranks in the top three. From Lightning Network’s $234M TVL to Stacks’ $1.18B, and the rising stars like Merlin Chain and RIF, this sector has already evolved from “proof of concept” to “ecosystem implementation.”

A Few Main Threads to Clarify the Current Situation

Payment-First Faction: Lightning Network is the old guard here (whitepaper in 2015, launched in 2018), with a core focus on speed—it can theoretically handle 1M TPS, compared to the BTC mainnet’s 7-10 TPS. That difference says it all. With Jack Dorsey’s endorsement and Twitter integration, its influence is significant.

Feature-Expansion Faction: Stacks (formerly Blockstack) is taking the smart contract route, using the STX token for transactions. The recent Nakamoto upgrade brought fresh attention to the ecosystem, and the appearance of sBTC made DeFi/NFT on BTC a reality. A price increase of 231%+ shows the market is buying in.

New Technology Paradigm: Merlin Chain uses ZK-Rollup for data compression, RIF is based on the RSK chain inheriting BTC security + EVM compatibility, and CKB focuses on “PoW + UTXO.” Each project is searching for its differentiation.

Quick Data Overview

Stacks and CKB have the most significant gains, indicating the market is betting on more feature-complete solutions.

But Don’t Overlook the Challenges

1. Liquidity Trap: Payment channels like Lightning require users to lock up funds, so money gets stuck off-chain, reducing flexibility.
2. Centralization Risks: Large transactions tend to concentrate on a few nodes, which goes against BTC’s original intent.
3. Ecosystem Fragmentation: Poor interoperability between L2s leads to fragmented user experiences.
4. High Learning Curve: Average users can’t understand these mechanisms yet, so widespread adoption is still far off.

Looking Ahead

If the BTC ecosystem really takes off, the future direction for L2 is:

• Continued tech iteration (new cryptographic algorithms, consensus mechanism optimization)
• Traditional finance onboarding (institutions need these tools)
• Improved developer-friendliness (better tools, documentation, incentives)
• More collaboration between projects (setting unified standards, reducing fragmentation)

Which direction has the most potential right now? More feature-complete (Stacks/RIF) vs. payment-focused (Lightning/Liquid)—each has its own logic. In the short term, it’s about trading hype; in the long term, ecosystem activity.

Risk Warning: This sector is still in the early experimental stage. There are both technical and liquidity risks—invest with caution.