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Botanix Labs has onboarded a couple of crypto industry heavyweights as node operators for its bitcoin layer-2 network.

Mike Novogratz's digital asset financial services firm Galaxy and crypto custody specialist Fireblocks are among 16 new node operators on Botanix, the company announced on Thursday.

The operators have been onboarded and will be live once the Botanix mainnet launches later this quarter.

With the creation of a federation of different entities running nodes, Botanix Labs is establishing its eponymous network as "decentralized from the start."

"The network will soon migrate to a dynamic federation to support hundreds of nodes, with the eventual goal of allowing anyone in the world to run their own Botanix node," Botanix Labs said in Thursday's announcement.

Also joining the federation are blockchain developer Alchemy, bitcoin mining pool Antpool and hedge fund manager UTXO Management.

Botanix's testnet, known as Aragog, introduced various tools that will form the basis of its decentralized finance (DeFi) offering: BTC-backed stablecoin Palladium, decentralized exchange Bitzy and lending and borrowing market Spindle.

Botanix's protocol Spiderchain was built to be compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the software that powers Ethereum. This in theory would make any smart contract or DeFi application on Ethereum compatible with Bitcoin-based Botanix.

Developing Bitcoin into a settlement layer for DeFi activity elsewhere in the blockchain world has become a matter of increasing interest among the great and the good of the crypto industry.

With BTC's market cap consistently accounting for over 60% of the entire crypto market, developers see the opportunity in harnessing the deep reserves held in BTC to finance applications on networks more technically suited to DeFi, such as Ethereum, Solana or Cardano.

At the Dubai Token2049 conference last month Franklin Templeton's managing principal of blockchain venture capital Kevin Farrelly described this as trend as "infrastructure evolution...not narrative dilution," in response to those in the Bitcoin community who believe it dilutes from BTC's core purpose as a store of value.

The involvement of the likes of Galaxy and Fireblocks demonstrates that Bitcoin DeFi may become a sector that grows and grows.

Read More: Bitcoin's Role in DeFi Is 'Untapped Opportunity,' Binance Research Says

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