Let’s get something straight: crypto didn’t explode because of tech. It exploded because of tokens.
Tokens are the blood of this entire industry. They’re what turned Ethereum from a curiosity into a movement. They gave birth to ICOs, DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, and memecoins. Without tokens, crypto is just a handful of engineers geeking out. With tokens, it’s a global, liquid, user-driven economy.
Now here’s the twist: for the longest time, Bitcoin didn’t have tokens.That might sound wild to newcomers. Isn’t Bitcoin the biggest blockchain? Isn’t it where all the liquidity is? Yes. But as explained in our previous article How to Midl 01: Why, Bitcoin, why? building user-facing tokens directly on Bitcoin wasn’t really possible, or not in any clean or scalable way. No native token standards. No real marketplaces. No friendly dev tools. Just clunky workarounds and experiments that barely got traction.
Runes, Ordinals, and the Dawn of Bitcoin Tokenization
That changed with Ordinals and now Runes. These are the early building blocks of Bitcoin-native token standards. Think of them as the ERC-20 and ERC-721 equivalents - but born inside the harsh, minimalistic world of Bitcoin.
Ordinals kicked off a wave of digital inscriptions and NFTs on Bitcoin. Runes took the next step by trying to standardize fungible tokens. Are they perfect? Not yet. Are they usable? Just barely. But that’s exactly the point.
The situation of Runes and Ordinals now is the same as what the most early ERC20 tokens experienced. Plus, they have to overcome the OG bitcoin limitations, which used to be even harder. Like early ERC20, they struggle to get access to liquidity and their utility is still limited.
Yet despite that, they already kickstarted a whole ecosystem of strong communities gathering maximalists and newcomers around them.
This is EtherDelta Season on Bitcoin
Anyone who was in crypto during the early Ethereum days remembers EtherDelta and other early ETH dApps. Half-broken, bugged decentralized apps and exchanges where you could barely swap tokens. Charts looked like random noise. UXs were a nightmare. Yet that moment set the stage for everything: ERC-20 adoption, the ICO boom, Uniswap, and the DeFi summer.
That’s exactly where Bitcoin is today.
The infrastructure is raw. Wallet support is patchy. Indexers and explorers are all over the place. But for the first time ever, Bitcoin has native token standards being used by actual communities and that’s the breakthrough.
Because when you have native tokens, you start having:
Community-driven economies
Liquidity accessible without restrictions
Simple to use apps and protocols
Real users
Bitcoin didn’t need tokens to survive. But it does need them to thrive.
Ethereum Users Don’t Get the Struggle
Here’s the issue: most of crypto sees Ethereum as the blueprint. They assume Bitcoin can do the same things, just slower. That perception is wrong.
Ethereum had dev tools, testnets, documentation, and a culture of experimentation. Bitcoin had almost none of that. It was secure, robust, and conservative. It wasn’t built for apps. It wasn’t built for fast-moving innovation. It was built to be unbreakable.
And that’s why every step forward on Bitcoin is 10x harder, and 10x more significant.
Press enter or click to view image in full sizeIt doesn’t take much to understand from this timeline that as soon as tokens appeared and basic infrastructure such as exchanges (Etherdelta then Uniswap) enabled it, the ecosystem exploded into the DEFI summer of 2020 on Ethereum. Compare it with Bitcoin where Runes appeared in early 2024 (considering BRC20 was a limited first attempt at tokens on Bitcoin) and enablers like Midl are being launched now, and do the math…
So when people laugh at Bitcoin NFTs or question why a meme token on Bitcoin matters, they’re missing the point. They’re looking at the surface without seeing the path underneath.
The Difference Between Native and Layered
Let’s also be clear: this is not about Layer 2s or wrapped tokens. Bitcoin has had those for year and they never truly caught on. Why? Because they weren’t native. They didn’t live on the chain. They weren’t accessible to normal users as they complexified every step of their journey, making them bridge, use other tokens for fees, etc.
Nativity matters. When something is native, it taps directly into the base layer. It inherits the security, the simplicity, the finality. No bridges. Use BTC to pay for fees. No trust assumptions. Just raw access to the most trusted network in crypto.
That’s what’s finally happening.
The token wave is just starting. Bitcoin is entering its ERC-20 era. And if history rhymes, we’re not far from our own version of Uniswap, of OpenSea, of DeFi protocols built directly on Bitcoin using the Midl execution layer.
The big question isn’t whether Bitcoin will get there. It’s who will be first to build the killer apps: the ones that unlock the next wave of adoption on the chain that everyone already holds.
And that’s where Midl steps in.
In the next article, we’ll take you deeper into Midl itself: how it works, what makes it different, and how it finally unlocks the kind of application layer Bitcoin has always deserved.
