The lightning network is an extremely low-cost, nearly-instant protocol for fully settled transfer of arbitrarily small amounts of bitcoin with no counterparty risk. We anticipate use cases as infrastructure in disrupting traditional payments and FX rails as well as enabling new payment applications, including in video games and in metering access to online resources.

Bitcoin’s programmability and robust decentralization lends itself to a range of novel applications in the pricing of capital, from securities to dervatives collateral to insurance, and surely more to follow.

Mining provides a never-before-seen incentive to locate and monetize cheap or stranded energy. It is already dramatically changing the cost profile of capturing otherwise wasted energy and will prove an increasingly important tool for energy infrastructure worldwide.

Nostr is an early-stage but highly promising communications network that incorporates lightning payments in order to distribute the costs of online communications. While the first use case to gain serious traction has been free and open-source social media, we anticipate Nostr’s novel incentive mechanism, uniquely enabled by Bitcoin, will drive a wave of innovation in online communications.

We have backed several deep tech efforts to support R&D into novel scaling solutions for the Bitcoin Network, such as the Ark Protocol and Zero Knowledge Rollups.

Beyond the crucial and obvious use case as money, bitcoin's qualities as a scarce, open-source, and programmable digital asset lend it to being utilized in such diverse applications as in-game rewards, counterparty-free wagering tools, social media infrastructure, censorship-resistant data storage and broadcast, hardware incorporating signatures from private keys, and many more to come …