Midl: Bringing EVM smart contracts and DeFi to Bitcoin

GM, GM. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week, allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they've built. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Georgy, who is a DevRel at Midl. So if you didn't know, Midl is a Bitcoin-native execution environment that brings full EVM-compatible smart contracts and decentralized applications directly to Bitcoin. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Georgy, learn about Midl, and how you can get started building with it today. Alright, let's get into it.

GM, GM. Welcome to the show, Georgy. My pleasure, man, and I'm doing well. I'm really excited to learn about Midl. And yeah, thank you for taking the time out of your day to come chat with us today. I'm excited for our audience to learn all about you and all the great things you guys are bringing to the Bitcoin ecosystem. But before we get into that, would you just like to give a introduction about yourself?

Sure. Hello everyone, and thank you very much, Narb, for having me here. It's a pleasure. My name is Georgy, or George, whatever. My today's title at Midl is DevRel. I can be a core developer, I can be an operations manager, I can be someone else, whatever is required from today, basically. But I basically come from the technical background, which I think is pretty much important, so we can get sometimes deep into the technicalities. Otherwise, I'm also one of these developers who moved into the like management/operations just because it was the right thing to do for the company, kind of. And here I am. We are building Midl now for over one and a half years, and it's excited that we're close to the mainnet launch, and I can share the details about that and how things work technically. And yeah, once again, Narb, thank you very much for having me here.

My pleasure, my pleasure. And yeah, a lot of folks end up wearing many hats, especially in a startup world. So I've been there and as you said, you've been there. And but just curious, before joining Midl, how did you kind of start in the field of technology? Like, what gravitated you towards this field and how did you eventually end up at Midl?

Right. So I've been working in the Web3 industry for like six, seven years by now. I initially started back in the days as someone transitioning from just like junior/mid-level website builder into the smart contracts. I had an interest in finance, and specifically I had an interest in kind of finance which is not limited by people, so to say. So I learned about the smart contracts, I saw a position in my first Web3 company being open at this time, and I joined it as a junior smart contract developer. Since then, I think I passed around 12 or 13 audits on the smart contracts I've written, plenty of them are in production or were in production by now. And yeah, at some point I joined the team which was focused more on the R&D side of things, and this is basically how Midl emerged. We just saw a big pain in the market, a big niche which is basically missing from the market, and a lot of infrastructure specifically which is missing. So it was a great playground for me to step into.

Amazing. Yeah, it certainly a very, very interesting section of the tech space to jump into. I guess from the Bitcoin perspective, we all kind of, I think most of us who start in Web3 or in the blockchain development, really get hooked by Bitcoin. And then whether someone starts on the speculative side or starts on the builder side, that's up to them. But traditionally, Bitcoin has always kind of been viewed as this store of value and never really started with smart contracts or that programmability. And that's kind of what Ethereum took and ran with. So I guess from your perspective, being in the space this long, why do you think Bitcoin just didn't really care to have that programmability from the start?

I mean, it's one of the greatest strengths of the Bitcoin and one of the greatest disadvantages or weaknesses, whatever. It's absolutely built as a store of value. That being said, store of values, they have a tendency to be wanted to be used in any other kind of ways by people. So usually, and we can see this with another greatest store of value in the world, basically gold, which is being utilized in finance in many, many ways, and you don't really have to basically hold like a gold coin in your hand to utilize this in your in the finance. When we are talking about blockchains and cryptocurrencies, we have a little bit more flexibility on our side. We don't have to have wagons full of gold to utilize it in our whatever finance deals we want. We can be a little bit more techy-savvy and we can build things on top, and we can build them so incorporated in between that it's almost as if the actual Bitcoin is utilized. That's why we in Midl, we rarely use the words like L2 in this regard because what we focused on from the very beginning, because from the very beginning we just wanted to build either a decentralized version of Bitcoin which can be used on other networks for trading, or we wanted to build some kind of infrastructure for trading on top of the Bitcoin itself. But our current vision, so to say, is basically to build as little as we can on top and incorporate Bitcoin network as much as we can into EVM-compatible environment in order for the native Bitcoin to be utilized in your either day-to-day transactions or in your DeFi transactions or scaling into the institutional valuable things. And this is basically the thing that we had in mind and the thing that we've built. Every time you use anything on Midl, you utilize your native Bitcoin wallet, you utilize your native Bitcoin satoshis, essentially. You don't have to do any extra steps, and that's exactly why we are calling ourselves like L1.5 essentially.

Amazing. And we do see from time to time a lot of a lot of other platforms kind of say, 'Oh, we're bringing smart contracts to Bitcoin, we're doing it this way, that way.' I guess what's the differentiating factor from Midl's perspective? Sorry.

Yeah, I guess from the user's perspective, if we're not going into like very technically deep because that would take hours, but otherwise what's on the surface? Every time, and we can hold hands like this, every time you want to do something on any Bitcoin-related L2, what do you have to do? You first have to locate the bridge that you want to utilize, then you use the bridge and you wait for an amount of blocks. If you're using a reliable bridge, you wait for like at least three or four. If you use unreliable bridges, there are plenty of those, you wait for one block, which is still 10 to 15 minutes. Then you have to get another wallet on another network and you have to claim the Bitcoin that you bridged. So now you are claiming some kind of asset on another network. Then only then now at the step number four, you get to work with the app you wanted to work with. So now you're like trading, I don't know, investing, staking, I don't know, playing games, social-Fi, whatever, like sky's the limit here. Whatever you wanted to do at the step four, you do it, and you do it as long as you are at this L2. And then the time comes in and you want to, I don't know, cash out or hold the satoshis that you actually own at your Bitcoin wallet. So now you get to step number one, which is bridging back, and you bridge your assets back, and then even like the most unreliable bridges, you get to wait hours basically for this kind of stuff. So then you wait hours and then you claim your stuff back. So that's like seven steps and I usually describe this in like 12 or 14 fingers, but I kept it short this time.

With Midl, it's completely different. You see an app that you want to utilize which is built on Bitcoin by Midl. You connect your whatever wallet you have, like you use Xverse, the guys I love by the way, but you use Xverse, you connect it, you use Leather, you use UniSat, you use Ledger, absolutely, you connect Ledger through whatever browser extension there is, and that is it. And you get to use the application that you want. So we're still at the step number one. We didn't move anywhere. So you want to trade, you trade, you want to lend any kind of assets with your Bitcoin, you lend your assets with Bitcoin as collateral, you want to stake your Bitcoin in application, you do it, and it's still step number one. If your action that you just did has the function of you receiving some asset back, so for example you bought some, I don't know, Runes or Ordinals or you bought some kind of any other assets on the Bitcoin network, you instantly receive it back in a way that you don't have to do any anything else kind of actions. You don't have to locate any other bridges. This is all figured out for you. And this is all not even figured out for you by an application that you utilize, it's figured out by the infrastructure that we've built. So essentially, it's a seamless way for you not to waste your time on the steps that you are not supposed to waste your time with. And it's like if we get back to the comparison with the with gold, essentially, this is also I think a good comparison what Tether did, even though it's like quite centralized, of course, but whatever, I still think it's quite a good example.

You don't have to go to anyone and like ask to get your gold coins, then you don't have to go and like claim them and then bring your bag of gold to someone else. You just have it on the blockchain, and you have it secured with the with the programmable in a programmable way, and you just get to do whatever you get to do. And in our cases, like while I said there is a Tether which is centralized, and this is alright, this is their niche, but in our cases we utilize validators, essentially, and we built a network in a way that we can handle large amount of validators, not not small amount of validators, which is quite crucial and we saw it a few months ago with some other L2s on Bitcoin, yeah.

Amazing. Yeah, this very fascinating because you're essentially kind of you went through all the steps, right? It's like it sounds like a pain, most people probably stop after one or two steps because it's like, 'Oh, this is painful, I don't want to do this.' But it seems you guys are making it very seamless and just allowing people to go about their day as though they're just doing their regular thing. So many people in Developer DAO and watching the show are likely Solidity-based developers. So for those folks who might want to tap into the Bitcoin ecosystem, how seamless is their transition from taking their dApps as they are today and getting support on the Midl side for Bitcoin wallets to use them too?

Sure. It's one of the questions that I actually love to answer because we spent a lot of time into making the experience close to EVM-like experience. So the smart contracts that you write, you don't have to do anything with them as long as you perceive Bitcoin as 0x0 token or native token or gas token, whatever. So Bitcoin is the native token of the Midl. So if your smart contract is already compatible with native token and native token transfers, like send functions and like balance and stuff like this, you don't have to do anything, and that is it. That being said, we still are not an L2. And this means that every time you do a transaction on Midl, you do require a Bitcoin transaction being done, which is a great pain. As a developer who transitioned from EVM environment into Bitcoin, I can tell you that this is like such a big pain in the ass. It's unspeakable. Like we can we can just like stop talking right now and I will consume whatever amount of time left if even if it would be like hours, I would just I would just I don't know, complain about how much stuff is missing from the open source development in Bitcoin. This is what we saw like one and a half years ago, and this is why we have now Midl JS packages which are open to everyone, they are open sourced. They cover first of all basic just the base Bitcoin functions like I don't know, send Bitcoin, go over the UTXOs that you have, go over the UTXOs that you can use in the current block, and many, many more. Essentially, whatever you would usually need to have if you would be working with Ethereum essentially. In this case, there's just a bit more complexity with the UTXOs, but we really didn't like how complex it was. And we saw a way that it could be quite easily abstracted if we just spent time on it. So we written a lot of functions to streamline the development in that sense.

So, once again, you don't have to change your smart contracts, but you do have to migrate from the stuff that you usually like to use, which is in most of the cases Wagmi, Hardhat, sometimes Foundry. We got this covered essentially because Midl JS is based as like forks of these libraries and we built the Bitcoin, whatever Bitcoin-related stuff on top. So most of the functionality that you have, it's still compatible. The APIs that are used, the interfaces that are used within the code are still the same, but yeah, you have to migrate to another library. And you have to make sure that you have the Bitcoin wallet, you have to make sure that you funded with the Bitcoin, not Ethereum and stuff like this. Otherwise, we had a great feedback from the teams that already built on top of Midl, that the migration was fairly easy. And honestly, the biggest kind of learning curve was still understanding how Bitcoin wallets work comparing to Ethereum, which we cannot really abstract, but I think we done a great job there. So if you are an EVM developer, and I think we also had a very good example now I remember this.

We had a hackathon a few months ago, and it was specifically, I pushed this out, it was specifically like a 'vibe code' hackathon. So we really tried to show how easy it is to build apps with Bitcoin and with Bitcoin native assets without having any knowledge essentially about Bitcoin, about anything. And people could actually just go and grab whatever smart contracts they found, non-developers, from the stuff I've seen, and they still shipped working apps. Whatever, like their frontends might be insecure, but the main point is, there were like tens of tens and tens of apps that got shipped and got submitted for this hackathon. And people like didn't really even understand, I think, that it was that much related to Bitcoin because it was that much like building on on EVM environment.

Awesome. I mean, a lot of the times, at least when I was first learning blockchain development, there was always this big friction between these two sides, three sides, or however many sides there are now. And yeah, the biggest thing was always that Ethereum always had kind of the best tooling, the most evolved tooling, mature, whatever you want to call it. But it seems now that you guys are kind of making those lines blurry and making it more accessible to basically everybody, which is really great to hear. Yeah, just curious, from that hackathon, were there any particular projects that kind of stuck with you or like, 'Oh, this is really cool, I didn't think somebody would build this type of use case?'

I remember that I was amazed at the time. Like there was at least one staking solution which was fascinating from the financial standpoint, but honestly, I'm not sure if if the guy like went forward and did something with it. I remember I was amazed by the amount of successful applications. Like a lot of hackathons, they they receive things that don't work at all, things that are really easy like to be discarded. I remember I was going through the hackathon submissions and it was like it was it wasn't like the most successful hackathon, I think it was maybe like 60, 80 apps that got submitted, which is which is alright, not bad, not great. But what was great is the percentage of apps which were actually working. So I think more than 40 apps were actually working. And in my previous experience, it was usually quite straightforward to judge a hackathon even if it was like a huge hackathon with many submissions, usually it's quite straightforward. What I remember about about this thing that it was really painful to to discourage some people from building by not getting them into the list. I remember I talked with my team like, 'Should we like maybe increase the amount of people who should get like whatever?' But yeah, it was too much, to be honest. It was really painful to discard a lot of submissions, like many of them were really, really great. Of course, like we can link this with the acceleration of the AI development. Of course we can do that, but at the same time it was great to see that Midl is that that far far away that it's as easy to build something on top of Midl as it is on the EVM environment.

For sure. Yeah, I mean, these days, like you mentioned, AI has made it so easy for people to to get up and build whatever is in their minds. Especially this year, this year we've seen a really big acceleration and yeah, you can't do it, you have to pick a winner sometimes, and yeah, sometimes the best ones don't end up necessarily winning the prize, but that's not to say if you lost, not to continue, right? You could have a stellar product.

Absolutely not, you shouldn't, no. Exactly, exactly. And I guess since we're on the topic of AI, just curious to pick your brain, like how are you how are you using AI in your day-to-day? Are there any particular trends or anything that you're following or something that excites you in that space?

I mean, absolutely, the the way you work really changed in the past two years. And I'm one of the people that forbid using AI for some kind of stuff for many years, just not because I wasn't using AI as a, you know, a wall which you which you throw a ball with or whatever, not because I was feared about AI, but just because the quality wasn't good enough for me to even spend my time trying to improve it as a like result. And at some point, like last year, probably with the with the one of the Claude releases in November or whatever, it got it just jumped. And then I remember that last year I used to be using maybe 80, 90% of my time writing my code myself and then 10, 20% was written by Copilot, whatever, whatever model there was because they were all shitty and whatever. And then I remember then I jumped to maybe now 60, 40. And then I got like, 'Okay, can I increase the the percentage that I can not code myself and rather focus on the architecture and rather focus on reviewing?' Because I anyway review my code, so whatever. Then I started using more Claude specifically, and I then basically became a big believer or whatever or fan of Claude specifically, and I encourage everyone I know not to use other models for business purposes or for coding purposes.

Yeah, then there was like a quite big learning curve and also Anthropic, they they've been improving their models like like they've gotten mushrooms growing under the rain, whatever. And yeah, so I think I won't say like like Boris, the creator of Claude, that I'm not using the IDE anymore. I don't really know how does he do it. Like I really disagree with not using IDE in a way that you absolutely have to review the shit that that gets written, no matter how good your your loops are and no matter how good you streamlined your development, no matter how good you are at planning. I'm not sure how to read the code without the IDE. Reading that in GitHub as a PR is not handy or comfortable just because it like blinks most of the time. So not sure. I really like because I'm only saying this because Boris said this, I think last week, that he doesn't have an that he deleted IDE, I think he said. I have no idea how he does that. But yeah, absolutely I'm not going to say that I haven't written a single line of code, but it was much less and I can focus on delivering like more stuff and making it bulletproof kind of without wasting my time on on writing the utils that I already know how to write, but I cannot like I don't know, just copy them because they are in some other repo or they are protected by the IP or whatever. So the trend is that it it got it got here. Like people used to say that it's going to get here in 2030, it is here already. Like it's done. There is no turning back, essentially. This is the trend in my opinion.

I agree. I yeah, I think we're too far along to to go back now. And yeah, I was the same. I got I was kind of a skeptic and then around November, December, I think it was like Sonnet 4.6 or Opus 4.5 or whatever it was, that came out and gave that promotion and then I just started to go gung ho with it and like, 'Oh, oh, hello. Well then.' And then yeah, I've gotten hooked even more so. I would say for myself, I'm probably like a 20-80 split where 80% of the code is written by the AI and then I'm kind of like fixing the in-betweens and reviewing. But personally, I haven't gotten away from the IDE. I'm still IDE and the terminal together. But yeah, as we kind of close in on time, I just want to get from your perspective, what's the best way for people who are watching the show today to get started with Midl and how can they follow along with you guys?

Right. So it's absolutely going to js.midl.xyz or just to midl.xyz website and navigating there to the developer-related docs. And getting to it, essentially. I think Bitcoin has really clear niche of products which are which would really much value a greatest store of value you can imagine as a asset in in between, as a collateral, as a native token in these products. So just like get to it. Usually, I would say the simplest app it would require a few hours to migrate with the new packages. If it is really complex app, like for example, I don't know, Aave or Liquity, if you have like tens and tens of contracts with really complex deployment systems, then it can take a few days to migrate this just because from the amount of contracts and just because there is a limitation on the amount of information can pass within your Bitcoin transaction. So it can take a bit more time. But otherwise, first of all, understand why Bitcoin would be valued within the apps. So it's quite easily seen from the apps which are being utilized by the wBTC holders. And just get to it, I guess. You can you are also free to reach out to Midl with a form on the website or whatever way you find us guys, and we are really keen to support whoever like believes in the system and yeah, just I guess prepare for the next cycle in in that way.

Well said, well said. And yeah, all the resources that Georgy mentioned will be in the description of the podcast. So definitely check that out if it's something that interests you. And with that, Georgy, just want to thank you so much for the taking the time out of your busy day to come chat with us today.

Yeah, thank you very much for having me, Narb. It was a pleasure and thank you for your work.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. Yes. And yeah, excited for people to to finally kind of merge together and no more of this Ethereum versus Bitcoin, just everyone kind of work together. And with that, I just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be, and we will catch you back here next week for another great episode of DevNTell. Till then, have a good one, folks. Cheers.