A new era for Bitcoin.

Readers,

Apologies for the abrupt end of The Held Report over a year ago.

I hit peak burnout between writing the report weekly, creating social media content, and my executive role (note that paid subs were paused during this time period).

After a year of reconnecting with myself, and thinking through what I wanted to write about for the next few years, I feel that there is still a big gap in education for the average person with why Bitcoin matters AND Bitcoin DeFi (aka Ordinals, L2s, Sidechains, Lightning etc).

Why Bitcoin DeFi?

I first wrote about Bitcoin DeFi nearly three years ago. Readers might remember these posts (here, here, and here) in The Held Report.

When I left Kraken in the middle of 2022, I knew that DeFi on Bitcoin was the future. This was even before Ordinals had become thing.

Techcrunch

My thoughts from that article then summarize how I still feel now:

“Bitcoin is what I care about. Nothing changed there,” said Held, who has been in the space for over ten years. In his view, the stakes are rising for Bitcoin as the narrative in the crypto industry shifts towards decentralized finance (DeFi) from centralized finance (CeFi), and as market participants “find more meaning building on top of DeFi.”

The crypto industry, and Bitcoin, is at an inflection point, he said. “I think there’s going to be this renaissance in the Bitcoin DeFi world. Right now, DeFi is not synonymous with Bitcoin, and most people think those two words don’t really go together.”

Why do I care about DeFi on Bitcoin?

Because I care about adoption, which needed for Bitcoin to achieve it’s status as the world money and supports it’s decentralization.

It is undeniable that Bitcoin’s primary user acquisition method has been through the speculative cycles of 2013, 2017, 2021, and now-2025. This is the objective reality, no matter how uncomfortable it is. Come for the speculation, stay for the sound money.

Through DeFi, we unlock more speculative use cases, which I believe will bring about more adoption.

I saw this firsthand at NFT NYC where holders of Ethereum NFTs were now thinking in an Ethereum standard due to their exposure through NFTs. They had no idea how Ethereum worked, but that doesn’t matter as they are now believers. Funnily enough most Bitcoin holders have a tenuous grasp of the protocol (In 2017-2018 the Bank of Canada's survey found that only 53% of Bitcoin owners knew that Bitcoin's supply was fixed).

Regarding topics, my content will be L2 and application agnostic. I want to see all the Bitcoin layer 2’s blossom as each one has it’s own unique design and game theoretic tradeoffs.

The future of The Held Report

For the time being, I’m going to keep The Held Report free and just write when I feel like it. But I may switch paid back on again if I feel I can produce enough writing for the value.

Stay tuned for my next article, which is my long form thesis for Bitcoin DeFi: Casino Games: why speculation is the primary user acquisition method for money.

Cheers,
Dan Held