Who Is Charlie Hu and What Bitlayer Built on Bitcoin

Charlie Hu is the co-founder of Bitlayer, the Singapore company that shipped the first working BitVM bridge on Bitcoin in July 2025 and switched it off on 3 June 2026. He has no Wikipedia entry, and a search on his name surfaces a Hungarian singer and an ACM membership list before it surfaces him, which is a strange result for a founder whose company signed agreements with three of the largest Bitcoin mining pools. The BTR token that carries his company's name was up roughly 260% on a rolling 24-hour window at a 26 August 2026 data pull, inside a trading session that had not closed, and that move is the reason the name is being searched at all.

Two companion pieces on this site handle the other halves of the story, one on the BTR token and its numbers and one on the BitVM design itself. This article profiles the person and the arc of the company he co-founded, which means stating what was built, what it achieved, what stopped, and what is left standing. Every figure below traces to Bitlayer's own published posts or to a direct data pull timestamped 26 August 2026.

Charlie Hu at a Glance

One row in that table does the work of the whole profile. A founder who is publicly identified with a single product is difficult to write about once that product has been retired, and pretending otherwise would make this page worthless to anyone researching the name.

The Career That Led to a Bitcoin Layer 2

Hu's public biography starts in 2013, the year his Bitcoin MENA 2025 speaker bio says he bought his first bitcoin. What followed was roughly a decade of ecosystem work rather than protocol engineering, first around Polkadot, where he is described as an early-stage investor and contributor who built the network's presence across Asia, then at Tezos, and then at Polygon, where he led the Asia-Pacific ecosystem effort. Third-party profiles agree on the sequence of those roles but not on start and end dates for any of them, so this article prints the order and leaves the year ranges alone.

He co-founded Bitlayer with Kevin He in October 2023, and the split between the two founders is visible in the company's own material. Bitlayer's announcements of its funding rounds and its mining-pool agreements quote Kevin He as the technical voice, while Hu appears on conference stages and podcasts as the outward-facing one. That division of labour is common in crypto infrastructure and worth naming rather than blurring, the same way a founder profile of Hyperliquid's Jeff Yan has to separate the engineering from the storytelling.

One inconsistency deserves flagging. Some third-party reference profiles list Hu as Bitlayer's chief executive, while the conference bios the company supplied describe him only as co-founder, and no Bitlayer post reviewed for this article assigns him the chief executive title. Co-founder is the description used throughout.

What Bitlayer Set Out to Build on Bitcoin

Bitcoin does not run general smart contracts, and every attempt to give it that capability has to work around the fact that changing how Bitcoin itself works requires consensus from a network that is designed to resist change. Bitlayer's answer was a Layer 2 that would inherit Bitcoin's security through BitVM rather than through a fork, and the company's pitch was that this made it structurally different from earlier sidechains that relied on their own validator sets.

That thesis attracted institutional money. A company post dated 8 October 2024 announced $9 million in an extended Series A led by Polychain Capital and put total funding at $25 million, following an earlier round involving Franklin Templeton. Amazon Web Services published a customer case study describing Bitlayer as a Singapore-headquartered company founded in 2023 and building a Bitcoin Layer 2 on BitVM technology, which is as close to a neutral corporate description as the company has.

Bitlayer entered a crowded field. Several projects were pursuing different routes to Bitcoin programmability over the same period, and Bitcoin staking protocols such as Babylon went after the same idle BTC from another angle. What set Bitlayer apart was going first on an actual BitVM implementation.

What BitVM Is in Plain Terms

BitVM is a design that lets heavy computation happen off Bitcoin while Bitcoin itself keeps the ability to punish a lie about that computation. Nothing about the Bitcoin protocol changes. Instead, the parties involved pre-sign a structure of transactions that only becomes relevant if someone disputes the result, at which point the dispute gets narrowed down step by step until a single tiny operation can be checked directly on Bitcoin using the script capability it already has.

Think of it as a receipt that nobody audits until someone objects, backed by a bond that is forfeited if the objection turns out to be correct. Bitlayer's own bridge documentation states the assumption plainly, describing a system that requires only one honest participant to be secure. That is a very different guarantee from the multi-signature custodian committees most wrapped-Bitcoin products depend on, because it does not ask a majority of named parties to behave.

A companion article on this site covers the fraud-proof machinery and why implementations differ, since the mechanism deserves more room than a profile can give it. What matters for the Bitlayer story is narrower, and it is that the company took a design which existed on paper and put real money through it.

What Shipped and What Stopped

At its Summer Launch event in July 2025, Bitlayer announced BitVM Bridge Mainnet beta alongside a V2 whitepaper and a V3 preview. The bridge minted YBTC, a token held at a strict one-to-one peg with the BTC locked into the BitVM contract, and the company positioned it as the first functional BitVM implementation to hold real money rather than testnet balances.

Seven weeks before that, on 27 May 2025, Bitlayer published an agreement with Antpool, F2Pool and SpiderPoolnaming them BitVM Bridge Guardians. Their job was to accept and include the non-standard transactions the bridge design depends on, since those transactions are not relayed by default across the network. The post put the three pools' combined share of Bitcoin hashrate at 36.2%. A direct pull of mempool.space mining pool data on 26 August 2026 returned 166 blocks for AntPool, 142 for F2Pool and 107 for SpiderPool out of 964 blocks over a one-week window, or 43.0%. The company understated the concentration it had assembled, which is an unusual direction for a crypto announcement to err in.

Exactly one year after that post, it ended. A post on the Bitlayer blog dated 27 May 2026 announced the discontinuation of the BitVM Bridge service, stating that bridge-in was disabled effective 28 May 2026 and that YBTC holders could bridge assets back to BTC until 3 June 2026. The post describes an architectural rework as the reason and gives no relaunch date. Separate notices closed the BRC20 and Runes asset support on the official bridge and the SUI chain YBTC.B route in the same window, and a further notice dated 29 July 2026 shut the Bitlayer testnet at 23:00 UTC on 31 July 2026.

The money left in stages rather than at once. DefiLlama tracks the Bitcoin backing the YBTC family of assets as a daily series, and that series tells the arc more cleanly than any announcement does.

A thousand bitcoin moved out on a single day, 3 July 2026, a month after the exit window shut. The 400.00023 figure has then held across 56 consecutive daily points without changing by a satoshi, straight through the session that repriced BTR. Whatever bid drove that move, it was not deposits arriving.

What Is Still Running Under the Bitlayer Name

The Bitlayer chain has not stopped. DefiLlama's chain series read $454,665 at the 26 August 2026 pull, up from $449,170, $450,468 and $453,365 across the three preceding daily points, so the number is drifting rather than collapsing. For scale, the same series peaked at $406.9 million on 17 December 2024 and last printed above $360 million on 24 February 2025.

The BTR token trades, the blog still publishes announcements, and the chain still produces blocks. The company's most recent dated monthly report covers March 2026 and was published on 10 April 2026, putting YBTC family TVL at $99.98 million and monthly active addresses above 10,000. That same DefiLlama series read roughly $31.4 million at the 26 August 2026 pull, and the gap is the coin count rather than the bitcoin price, which is the more damaging of the two explanations.

What is not running is the thing the company was known for. And the mining-pool arrangement, which remains the most genuinely impressive thing Bitlayer assembled, was signed to secure a bridge that no longer accepts deposits.

What to Watch on Bitlayer From Here

A dated relaunch, not an architectural promise. The discontinuation post commits to a rework without a timeline, and a rework with no date is indistinguishable from a shutdown until a date appears. A specific mainnet target on the company blog is the first real signal.

The 400.00023 balance. That single figure is the cleanest available test of anything the company says next, because a rise means deposits have resumed and a fall to zero means the last holders have exited. Anything in between is commentary rather than evidence of a restart.

Monthly reporting past March 2026. Companies that are shipping tend to say so on a schedule, and the cadence broke well before the bridge did.

Re-signing the pools. Antpool, F2Pool and SpiderPool committed to a specific technical behaviour for a specific product, and a successor design would need that commitment again. Mining pools that have watched a partner's flagship close are a harder sell the second time.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Charlie Hu?

Charlie Hu is a co-founder of Bitlayer, a Singapore-based Bitcoin Layer 2 company he started with Kevin He in October 2023. His earlier work was in ecosystem building around Polkadot, Tezos and Polygon rather than in protocol engineering, and he has no Wikipedia entry, which is why searches on his name return unrelated results ahead of him.

Is Bitlayer's BitVM Bridge still working?

Bitlayer disabled bridge-in on 28 May 2026 and closed the bridge-out window on 3 June 2026, so no, it is not. The company called the change an architectural rework and gave no relaunch date. Any guide or exchange listing that still describes the bridge as live has not been updated since May 2026.

What happened to YBTC and can it still be redeemed?

YBTC was the one-to-one Bitcoin-pegged token minted when users locked BTC into the BitVM contract, and minting stopped when bridge-in was disabled. The redemption grace period ended on 3 June 2026, and roughly 400 BTC has sat against the remaining supply without moving since 3 July 2026.

Does Bitlayer control 43% of Bitcoin's hashrate?

No, and the framing is wrong in a way worth correcting. Antpool, F2Pool and SpiderPool agreed to include a particular class of transaction that the bridge needed, which is a relay commitment rather than a transfer of control, and those pools mined 43.0% of blocks in the one-week window sampled on 26 August 2026 entirely independently of Bitlayer.

Bottom Line

Charlie Hu's company did something nobody else had done, which was take BitVM off the whiteboard and run real bitcoin through it, and then it could not hold what it built. The record to judge him on is that sequence rather than either half of it. For anyone reading the BTR move as a comeback, the test is narrow and public. The Bitcoin balance behind YBTC has to move off 400.00023, a relaunch has to carry a date, and the mining pools have to sign again. None of those had happened as of 26 August 2026. Until at least one does, the fair reading is that a token is being repriced while the protocol underneath it sits exactly where it was on 3 July 2026, and the wider record of what happens when Bitcoin bridges fail suggests an orderly wind-down with a published exit window is the better of the outcomes available.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always conduct your own research before making trading decisions.