Opinion by: Alisia Painter, chief operating officer of Botanix Labs
Without Ethereum, the industry wouldn’t be where it is today in terms of bringing decentralized finance (DeFi) to life, making programmability a key feature of blockchains and proving the value of smart contracts at scale. The Ethereum Virtual Machine has become the go-to platform for developers, with the largest ecosystem and tooling.
As DeFi matures, however, it’s worth asking: Is Ethereum the best foundation for the future of financial innovation? Well, the answer might just be Bitcoin.
With nearly $6 billion in total value locked as of March 2025, Bitcoin’s decentralization, liquidity and resilience position it as the natural home for the next era of onchain finance, and while Ethereum’s flexibility has enabled an explosion of experimentation, that same flexibility has come with trade-offs.
From vulnerabilities in smart contracts we’ve seen in big-name hacks to ongoing debates around scalability, Ethereum’s experimental ethos