The next two years will be decisive for Bitcoin’s evolution into a fully-formed global economic system, according to Kyle Ellicott, executive director of the** Stacks Asia Foundation**, who also warned that the biggest threat is not technical.
It’s that developers and Bitcoin L2 builders are not present in the regulatory rooms where the future rules for the ecosystem are being written, he said in an interview with Yellow.com.
Ellicott argues that Bitcoin is transitioning from a “store of value” narrative to a productive economic layer, with total value locked rising from about $300 million in 2023 to nearly $10 billion by 2025.
Institutional demand, sovereign reserves, and the spread of Bitcoin-based lending, staking and rollups have accelerated that shift.
But he says this growth phase requires coordination with regulators, not after-the-fact compliance.
He points to the United States, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and the UAE as examples of regions where policy has shifted sharply in favor of Bitcoin participation.
Japan is reevaluating its 55% digital-asset tax regime.
The U.S. has reversed course with broad support for Bitcoin-focused financial products. In Abu Dhabi, ADGM created a DLT framework that Ellicott describes as “flexible and future-forward,” shaped through direct engagement with industry participants.
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His concern is that most developers and founders building on Bitcoin layers, including Stacks, are not part of these discussions.
Without early participation, he says, policies risk being shaped without an understanding of how developers actually build, deploy or secure applications.
“If you’re not in the room helping to set that foundation, it can be a big struggle,” he said, adding that this gap could define adoption trajectories in Asia and the Middle East.
Ellicott frames this as a repeat of lessons from the early Web2 era, when companies like Uber pushed into markets only to discover regulatory structures that did not match their product assumptions.
For Bitcoin, the stakes are higher: a two-trillion-dollar asset, over 20 million users holding more than one dollar of BTC, and growing expectations for programmable functionality.
He believes the window is narrowing.
The next two years, he says, depend on whether builders choose to engage policymakers directly or remain on the sidelines while regulators set the terms of Bitcoin’s next phase.
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