Will Stablecoins help in Bitcoin adoption? with Gareth Grobler | SLP726

**Gareth Grobler** (0:00)
We need to move away from explaining things to people, politicizing it. We need to move away from all those narratives and rather let people experience Bitcoin.

**Stephan Livera** (0:10)
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Today, we're going to be talking about Layerz Wallet with the co-founder Gareth Grobler. I met Gareth at Baltic Honey Badger, I think, and some of the conferences and things I've seen Gareth around. And he had an interesting idea with what he and the team are building, so I thought it would be interesting to get him on. Gareth, welcome to the show.

**Gareth Grobler** (0:33)
Yeah, thanks, Stephan. Nice to be here. I appreciate the opportunity.

**Stephan Livera** (0:37)
Yeah. So look, I mean, for listeners, obviously a lot of people listening are people in the industry, developers, builders, advocates, whatever. But let's start with Layerz Wallet, like what exactly you're building. As I saw and as you explained to me, the idea is it's like if you just had a wallet with just every layer on there. So just talk to me a bit about that. What's the premise of Layerz Wallet?

**Gareth Grobler** (1:00)
Yeah, so I think this, I suppose the best way to start is, you know, I'm a bitcoiner. And, you know, we all know how the markets have gone and how the industry has grown and expanded. And we sort of felt that what's happened was, you know, Bitcoin was there, and then Ethereum came along, and all these other layers, all these other blockchains came along, creating different opportunities, different tech. And then sort of 2024, it felt like things started coming back to Bitcoin. You know, people from Ethereum started developing back on Bitcoin. But what we noticed was these Bitcoin Layer 2s created silos. So sort of they locked up value in silos, and it required users to have multiple wallets, you know, multiple devices, and that creates risk, it creates friction. So we thought, okay, you know, we Bitcoiners, Bitcoin first, and we want to add value to the Bitcoin ecosystem. And one of the ways we thought of doing that was by bringing all the Bitcoin Layer 2s into one simple user interface. Now, we call it a wallet, but really it's more of a exploration tool to explore everything that Bitcoin has to offer whilst keeping the risks as low as possible. You know, how many people have lost funds by copying and pasting addresses. So, it's those little things that we wanted to remove. And, you know, we don't have any specific Layer 2 that we think, oh, this is the winner, because they're all different. They have different trade-offs.
They offer different things to different people. Some try and achieve the same thing in different ways. Some have different unique selling points. You know, we want to take a sort of Switzerland approach where we're not going to pick a winner. We're just going to give everything to users and let them decide what they need to use and what works for them.

**Stephan Livera** (2:55)
Yeah, now, obvious questions. Which, obviously, you got Bitcoin on chain, I presume, and I presume you have Lightning. Tell us, like, what are the L2s precisely that you are supporting, or at least list off the main ones that you have?

**Gareth Grobler** (3:08)
Yeah, so, interesting thing is there's currently 83 Bitcoin-based Layer 2s projects out there, so there's a ton of them. Again, not all of them have the same sort of gravitas behind them. But yeah, we went and looked at the main ones and the ones that we think that add value to users right now. You've got Spark and Arc. Those are the two sort of exciting ones at the moment. And then we've obviously got Lightning, we've got Liquid, we've got Stacks, Rootstock, the guys are currently working on RGB. And then one of the newer ones, or two of the newer ones that came in is the Citria and Botanix. So yeah, those are the main ones we're looking at. But like I said, we don't have any, we sort of want to be agnostic in terms of what we think is the best for people. We just want to add them all on there and make it easy and simple for users to decide for themselves. So ultimately, the sort of final vision we've got is where a user can decide which layers they turn on, which ones they turn off and how they interact with them.

**Stephan Livera** (4:23)
Yeah. And so talk us through the setup and the... Like, I guess, actually, sorry, let me ask this question. Is your target user a power user or is it just like a total noob to Bitcoin can use this? Like, we're in the spectrum. Talk to us who you see your target user as.