You Won’t Believe How Rootstock Beat Bitcoin at Its Own Game—But Users Are Still Napping 😴💥

by

Picture this: Rootstock, the wiseguy of smart contract platforms riding on the back of Bitcoin like a jockey at the Kentucky Derby, just cranked up its mining activity to historic heights in Q1 2025. Security’s tighter than my mother’s purse at a casino—meanwhile, most users are apparently at lunch.

Here comes the Messari “State of Rootstock” report, shouting, “We got merged mining up to 81%! Last time we saw numbers like that, disco was still alive.” Big thanks to mining pools like Foundry and SpiderPool; they brought so much electricity you’d think they were powering Las Vegas. Hash power? Fuhgeddaboudit—740 exahashes per second! Even Bitcoin’s like, “Oy, slow down!”

The report says this is all very “mature.” Mature? Please! The only thing that matures here is the cheese on my pastrami sandwich. They did get one thing right: transaction fees went down 60%, which means you can finally afford to do something on this thing without selling your kidney.

“BTCFi is growing so fast, Rootstock is ready for mainstream,” says Messari’s Andrew Yang. Ready? Maybe. Wide awake? Not quite. Despite miners mining like there’s no tomorrow, total value locked (TVL)—basically the dough in the system—said “so long!” and dropped faster than my mood after a surprise colonoscopy.

Specifically, TVL in Bitcoin dropped 7.2%, and in dollars it tanked 20% to $179.9 million. (It was $244.6 million just a few months ago, but hey, who’s counting? Certainly not the TVL!)

And it’s not just Rootstock’s drama: Ethereum’s TVL took a 27% nosedive, mostly due to a $1.4 billion Bybit hack, bad vibes, and the market’s best impression of a yo-yo. Stablecoins got stage fright, too. Tether (USDT) is still king of the hill with $3.8 million, but its reign is about as stable as a three-legged chair. No stablecoin could even hold 30% of the market by the end of the quarter. They’re trading dominance faster than a Broadway cast swap.

User activity? Call it a ghost town. Active addresses are down 26.5%, and new ones dropped by 54.7%. At this rate, it’s just you, me, and the janitor mopping up. The only silver lining: daily transactions are up 4.3%. That’s 11,524 a day! (Okay, so apparently someone missed the memo about everyone leaving.)

Meanwhile, Rootstock jazzed things up with their Lovell 7.0.0 update—“Now with 200% more Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility!”—plus fresh integrations, hackathons, and a governance system called RootstockCollective, which, if you ask me, sounds like a band my cousin Tony played drums for in the ‘80s.

Read More

2025-05-08 19:32