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VC money isn’t the enemy — it’s the fuel. That’s the message from Bitcoin layer‑2 builders, who defended venture capital’s role in scaling Bitcoin during the Token2049 conference in Dubai.
Bitlayer: “You can’t build without capital”
Charlie Yechuan Hu, CEO of Bitlayer, dismissed the Bitcoin purist view that rejects VC involvement. He argued that real infrastructure — like servers, cloud services, and developer salaries — can’t run on ideology alone.
“You need developers… you need to pay for the cloud. So, we have to have VC,” Hu said.
He added that the idea of a “fair mint” funding everything is nice in theory but not realistic in practice.
Lightning‑only advocates push back
Not everyone’s convinced. Mike Jarmuz, managing partner at Lightning Ventures, said his firm only backs Lightning Network projects — no tokens, no staking, no APY games.
“If a project has staking and promises high yield — run,” said Jarmuz.
He called Lightning the only real L2, pointing to its growing adoption and channel capacity, currently at $452 million.
Other layer‑2 projects, he said, are either “masquerading as useful” or simply not gaining traction.
VCs enable long‑term vision, say builders
Hu pushed back on that narrow view. He said VCs help open doors to institutional networks, liquidity, and engineering resources that most startups can’t access alone.
His experience was echoed by Walter Maffione, lead engineer at Kaleidoswap, a Lightning‑based DEX, who noted VC funds helped pay open‑source developers — not mint governance tokens or yield games.
“VCs funded us to build, not to rug,” Maffione said.
Not all VCs are created equal
Vikash Singh of Stillmark, a Bitcoin VC firm, said his team invests based on security, real‑world use cases, and application layer growth. While he prefers proof‑of‑work, he acknowledged that proof‑of‑stake or Byzantine fault tolerance might work for sidechains or rollups.
In short, VC‑backed projects may not be Bitcoin’s enemy — they may be the only reason it has an L2 ecosystem at all.
