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name: bitcoin-l2-botanix description: | Botanix: RETIRED EVM-compatible Bitcoin L2 using "Spiderchain" architecture (federated multisig rotated by orchestrators). stBTC native staking. Mainnet 1 July 2025; wind-down announced 5 June 2026. USE WHEN: studying Spiderchain federation rotation as a design, or explaining why Botanix is no longer a deployment target. allowed-tools: Read, Grep, Glob

Botanix

RETIRED. Botanix Labs announced the wind-down of the Botanix network on 5 June 2026; the wind-down was staged from 1 July 2026, with final network shutdown scheduled no later than 1 August 2026. Not a deployment target. Everything below describes the network as it operated between mainnet launch (1 July 2025) and the wind-down.

Bitcoin L2 with EVM compatibility and a novel Spiderchain architecture for federation rotation.

Status (as of September 2026)

• Wind-down announced 5 June 2026 in the official post "Winding Down Botanix: What We Built, and Why We're Stopping".
• Withdrawal deadline: the botanixlabs.com banner reads "Botanix is shutting down on July 1, 2026 ... Please withdraw your assets before this deadline." The post gives a staged plan: target 1 July 2026, a two-week grace period to 15 July, then if needed two more weeks to 1 August 2026, "when the final shutdown of the network occurs".
• After shutdown: "the federation will sweep the remaining Bitcoin and the company starts its dissolving process"; capital return was expected to run into October 2026. Secondary press (Decrypt, crypto.news, cryptotimes.io) reported a 9 July 2026 cutoff and that non-BTC tokens become permanently unrecoverable - neither statement appears in the official post.
• Not a technical or security failure. The post claims "a year of mainnet operation with one hundred percent uptime and zero security incidents", 25 million transactions and 200,000 wallets across the mainnet year (July 2025 - 2026), after nearly four years of building. The reasons given are demand-side: mistiming the Bitcoin community's appetite for L2 utility, token-incentive bootstrapping no longer working, and wrapped BTC on an existing L2 such as Arbitrum being sufficient for most Bitcoin DeFi demand.
• docs.botanixlabs.com is stale: it still reads as a live network with a forward roadmap. Do not treat it as evidence the chain runs.

Spiderchain architecture

• Federation multisig periodically rotates.
• Each "spider" is a federation slice with its own multisig.
• BTC distributed across multiple spiders for redundancy.
• Trust assumption: at least one spider's quorum honest.

EVM

Standard EVM execution. Solidity contracts were deployable unchanged.

Native token

• stBTC: staked BTC, earned Botanix-native yield.
• BTC bridged 1:1.

Position

Mid-tier Bitcoin L2 from mainnet (1 July 2025) to the wind-down announced 5 June 2026. Smaller TVL than Merlin but distinguished by the Spiderchain design. As of September 2026 it is of architectural interest only.

Use cases (historical, 2025-2026)

• EVM DeFi on Bitcoin.
• stBTC yield for staked BTC.
• Cross-bridge ecosystem.

Limitations

• Spiderchain rotation still implies federation trust per rotation cycle.
• Newer ecosystem vs Stacks / RSK - and never deep enough to sustain the chain. Press coverage of the June 2026 wind-down (crypto.news; news.bitcoin.com, "Botanix Pulls Plug on Bitcoin L2 After 4 Years as Fee Income Falls Short", 10 June 2026) attributes it to activity and fee revenue that did not cover long-term operating costs; the official post frames the same outcome in demand-side terms.

See also

• bitlayer/SKILL.md
• hemi/SKILL.md
• bob/SKILL.md
• merlin/SKILL.md