EP. 226 - Midl: Bringing EVM smart contracts and DeFi to Bitcoin

**Georgy Skryuchenkov** (0:00)
Every time you want to do something on any Bitcoin-related L2, what do you have to do? You first have to locate the breach that you want to utilize, then you use the breach, and you wait for an amount of blocks, 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 breached with Midl, it's completely different. You see an app that you want to utilize, builds on Bitcoin with Midl, you connect whatever wallet you have, and that is it.

**Narb** (0:41)
Welcome to the DevNTell Podcast, where founders, hackers and anyone in between showcase their products built on the bleeding edge of tech. GM, GM, welcome to our show.

**Georgy Skryuchenkov** (0:51)
GM, GM, thank you very much for having me. How are you doing?

**Narb** (0:54)
My pleasure. My pleasure, man. I'm doing well, I'm doing well. I'm really excited to learn about Midl. And yeah, thank you. 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.

**Georgy Skryuchenkov** (1:19)
Hello everyone. And thank you very much for having me here. It's a pleasure. My name is Georgy, or George, or whatever. My today's title at Midl is DevRel. I can be a core developer. I can be 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 management slash operations, just because it was the right thing to do for the company.
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 main launch, and I can share the details about that and how things work technically. And once again, Narb, thank you very much for having me here.

**Narb** (2:33)
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, yeah, you've been there.
But just curious, before joining Midl, how did you kind of start in the field of technology? Like what gravitated towards this field? And how did you eventually end up at Midl?

**Georgy Skryuchenkov** (3:01)
Right. So I've been working in the Web3 industry for like six, seven years by now.
I initially started back in the day as someone transitioning from just like junior slash 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 Webflow company, been 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 markets, a big niche which is basically missing from the markets, and a lot of infrastructure specifically which is missing. So it was a great kind of playground for me to step into.

**Narb** (4:47)
Amazing. Yeah, it's certainly a 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 a store of value and never really started with smart contracts or that programmability. That's kind of what Ethereum took and ran with. So I guess from your perspective, being in the space and the song, why do you think Bitcoin just didn't really care to have that programmability from the start?

**Georgy Skryuchenkov** (5:42)
I mean, it's one of the greatest strengths of the Bitcoin and it's one of the greatest disadvantages or weaknesses.
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 has been utilized in finance in many, many ways. And you don't really have to basically hold a gold coin in your hand to utilize this in the finance. When we are talking about blockchains, 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 tech 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 these regards, 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 in 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 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 18 on Midl, you utilize your native Bitcoin wallets, you utilize your native Bitcoin Satoshis, essentially. You don't have to do any extra steps, and that's exactly why we're calling ourselves L15, essentially.