Take one look at X (formerly Twitter) today and you’re bound to see headlines and information pertaining to the latest dubious actions of those in power and their questionable moves within the crypto space.

But “Crime Season,” the name affectionately bestowed upon the crypto world at this point in time given the almost daily occurrence of politically motivated memecoin launches and their ensuing suspected rug pulls, appears to have a few bright spots, with Acre—a Bitcoin compounding platform—being one of them.

Founded by the team behind Thesis and supported by leaders in economic security such as Lido, EigenLayer, and Wormhole, Acre has over a decade of Bitcoin expertise focused on simplicity and transparency to allow users to choose where and how they compound their Bitcoin.

Laura Wallendal, co-founder and chief executive officer of Acre, walked me through the process  during a recent interview.

“We’re open-sourced,” she said. “You deposit your Bitcoin, it does all of this wild stuff in the background, we bridge it, it deploys to a vault, and the vault is a Layer 2 and here’s why we chose it and here’s how it works. I want to make sure we’re leading with that, but you don’t have to know everything about it. You don’t have to know how to bridge yourself, you don’t have to switch wallets and you don’t have to switch chains. We’re just being really upfront with the decisions we’re making because it's not our Bitcoin, it’s yours.”

Like the trust we put in banks to have savings accounts that earn interest, trusting a web3 protocol with the compounding of your Bitcoin works in a similar way. In this case, the interest earned on the lending of your Bitcoin is reinvested in Bitcoin.

Read more: Programmable Bitcoin Leads Gamma Founder Jamil Dhanani to Offer BTC-Backed NFTs

And while that Bitcoin is then bridged to Ethereum as part of the compounding process, it’s also a step Wallendal has implemented within Arce to provide transparency and security. She has over a decade of experience scaling high-growth companies, and has raised over $60 million in capital for startups across the crypto ecosystem; she’s also a frequent speaker on financial sovereignty and the future of Bitcoin.

Committed to transparency and user empowerment, she designed Acre to provide a secure, accessible way for Bitcoin holders to compound their Bitcoin while staying true to Bitcoin’s original principles of self-sovereignty and decentralization. To date, Acre has amassed over $100 million in total value locked through a gated launch with more than 35,000 active community members.

“Tech has always been an interest of mine and I started my first tech startup in educational technology—EdTech— around 2010,” Wallendal said.

She then went through three accelerator programs—Betaspring, MassChallenge and Techstars—and in 2011, while at Betaspring, met Matt Luongo who was also running an educational technology startup at the time.

“Matt Luongo is the CEO of Thesis, which is a Bitcoin venture studio now, but this was before we were both into Bitcoin,” Wallendal said. “At the time, we both had separate startups going through the Betaspring accelerator and knew that we wanted to figure out a way to work together one day. His start-up failed before mine did—mine failed later—and during that time, he and Corbin Pon, the other Thesis co-founder, spent time on my couch trying to convince me to leave my start-up and join them in Bitcoin in San Francisco.”

But Wallendal was convinced her start-up in EdTech was the future and shook them off.

Nerd money

“I was like, I don’t know about this ‘nerd money’ thing, but good luck, guys,” she said. “I’m into it, I’m here for it, but I’m not ready to leave my start-up for your tiny Bitcoin thing.”

It wasn’t until 2016, after she’d stepped away from her start-up and was working with other startups to help them hit their inflection points, that she finally decided to check out what Matt and Corbin had been advocating for those past five years.

“Matt and Corbin hit me up and asked me if I had 10 hours a week to help them think through and grow their little Bitcoin project called ‘Fold,’” Wallendal said. “I agreed to help them out and ended up going down a rabbit hole. I got rid of all of my other clients because all I wanted to do from then on was work in Bitcoin. I was like, ‘This is it. This is what I’m doing now.’”

Fold then became the first product of Thesis before it was a studio, and Wallendal’s role became growing and scaling all of the different projects as Thesis’ chief operating officer.

“In September 2023, I was chatting with Matt about what was next, and we thought Bitcoin L2s were going to be the thing,” Wallendal said. “We were talking about compounding Bitcoin and I realized that—as a degen—I knew how to earn Bitcoin on your Bitcoin.”

But Wallendal also realized her understanding of how to do so was very niche knowledge.

Connecting supply with demand

“It made total sense, I knew how to do it, I knew how to think about risk and different strategies, but if I wanted other people to be able to do it, it wasn’t accessible,” she said. “But it needed to be.”

So she began thinking about how to better communicate the value of different pools and the programmability of bridging with Bitcoin, which is where the idea for Acre came about.

“We’re not a Layer 2, but we work with a whole bunch of different Bitcoin protocols,” Wallendal said. “Bitcoin Layer 2s, lending protocols, DeFi—there are a whole bunch of different opportunities to use your Bitcoin to earn on top of it, and folks who will pay for that liquidity in their protocol.”

What Acre does is connect the people who have Bitcoin with different Bitcoin protocols—most of which are Layer 2s and are willing to pay for the liquidity and economic security of Bitcoin bootstrapping their protocol.

“We’re connecting the supply and demand side,” Wallendal said. “We call it the ‘Acre dispatcher,’ where it’s our job to efficiently connect these two sides of the market, and this is what that looks like securely and sustainably. That’s how we look at Acre. It’s not just ‘juiciest yields’—for us Principal Protection is really important, which is why everything is on-chain.”

Being not “all about the yield” is something that resonates with Acre’s community, which Wallendal said is not only comprised of Bitcoin depositors, but people who are closely following different Layer 2 protocols and who have a deep care and understanding of the blockchain space.

“The future of DeFi is about simplicity and improving the user experience,” said Yaroslav Writtle, project lead at Yelay, a crypto yield optimization platform that turns yield into real-world value. “It’s important that people maintain their digital assets and for it to be easy to generate yield from those assets in a risk adjusted way. It’s about abstracting away the staking, earning and spending of yield, whether for BTC or anything else, and we want people to be able to spend that yield in a seamless way. It’s about making DeFi more user friendly and enabling people to spend dividends without having to mess around with moving things back and forth, on-ramping and off-ramping or bridging.”

And it’s precisely because people want both simplicity and trust that Acre has put so much effort behind transparency and how other people’s Bitcoin is being handled.

“Last cycle, people learned some really hard lessons, especially in Bitcoin,” Wallendal said. “This cycle, there are lots of opportunities to earn, but it’s harder to assess risk, and people are a little more risk-averse. While I think there’s a lot of hype, froth and infrastructure happening this cycle, the thing that remains is people want to compound their Bitcoin and you don’t just trust anybody with it.”

lead image: Laura Wallendal