Bitcoin DeFi has an audience problem. Not a technology problem, not a security problem, but a concentration problem. The people who want it really want it, and there just aren’t that many of them yet.
That’s the picture emerging from Rootstock, the EVM-compatible Bitcoin sidechain that has quietly become one of the most established players in Bitcoin’s nascent DeFi ecosystem. A Rootstock executive has pointed to demand that is focused in small, deep markets, a polite way of saying the sector is driven by a handful of serious institutional players rather than a broad wave of retail users.
The security is there, the users less so
Rootstock has achieved something genuinely impressive on the security front, capturing 84.01% of Bitcoin’s total hashrate through merged mining in Q1 2026. That’s up from 81% as recently as May 2025.
In English: miners who already secure Bitcoin are simultaneously securing Rootstock at almost no additional cost.
