Kevin O’Leary Backs Bitcoin Resilience as Bitcoin Layer 2 Project Hyper Raises $28.8M

As macro chatter cools, attention is shifting from Fed cuts toward how a bitcoin layer 2 can turn long-term BTC conviction into real transaction utility.

Kevin O’Leary shifts the Bitcoin debate away from Fed policy

Kevin O’Leary has taken a blunt stance on Bitcoin in 2024: if the asset’s appeal hinges on a single Federal Reserve meeting, the thesis was never solid. The Canadian businessman and TV personality argues that $BTC can stand on its own even without imminent rate cuts, pushing focus back to adoption, utility, and real demand.

For everyday $BTC holders, that is a major pivot from the usual ‘pivot or no pivot’ guessing game over Fed decisions. Instead of trading on macro headlines, investors are increasingly asking what infrastructure actually lets people pay, trade, and build financial applications on Bitcoin. However, this question quickly exposes the base layer’s structural limits.

Bitcoin still processes roughly seven transactions per second, with long confirmation times and periodic fee spikes during congestion. That works for a store-of-value ledger, but it is a non-starter for high-frequency DeFi, NFTs, or gaming workloads. Moreover, it leaves most bitcoin defi and gaming activity migrating to faster chains rather than staying inside the BTC economy.

Why macro fatigue is driving attention back to Bitcoin infrastructure

After nearly two years of ‘will they, won’t they’ speculation on Fed cuts, investor fatigue around macro narratives is growing. Bitcoin’s resilience through several rate-hike cycles has already challenged the idea that it is simply a leveraged bet on global liquidity conditions. Increasingly, the more durable story is that $BTC can ride out macro noise if it continues to gain real-world usage.

At the same time, Bitcoin’s base chain was never designed for modern, smart-contract-heavy workloads. Competing Layer 1s such as Solana and Ethereum deliver sub-second or low-single-second finality and process thousands of transactions per second, with fees often below $0.01. That said, the gap in throughput and programmability has practical consequences for where developers choose to deploy.

As a result, NFTs, perpetual DEXs, and gaming clusters have gravitated to these alternative chains instead of building directly on Bitcoin. To pull that activity back toward $BTC, a wave of new scaling projects is emerging. Among the frontrunners, Bitcoin Hyper positions itself within a broader race to combine Bitcoin’s settlement guarantees with the throughput and flexibility required to host complex DeFi, NFT, and gaming ecosystems at scale.

Bitcoin Hyper’s approach to high-throughput BTC utility

Bitcoin Hyper presents itself as a high-octane way for investors to express long-term Bitcoin conviction through actual network usage. Rather than asking traders to time macro cycles, the project offers a Bitcoin-aligned Layer 2 that aims to reach, and even exceed, Solana-style speeds. Crucially, it does this while still anchoring settlement and trust to the main Bitcoin chain.

Where the project stands out is in its choice of execution environment. Instead of inventing a new virtual machine from scratch, Bitcoin Hyper integrates the Solana Virtual Machine directly into its architecture. This solana virtual machine integration gives developers access to SVM’s parallel execution and high-TPS design while channeling economic value back through Bitcoin.

Under the hood, Bitcoin Hyper uses a modular design in which Bitcoin Layer 1 acts as the settlement and security anchor, while a real-time SVM Layer 2 handles computation. A single sequencer batches and orders transactions before periodically anchoring state back to the base chain. However, despite this central ordering mechanism, the project emphasizes that $BTC remains the ultimate source of truth for settlement.

For end users, the architecture translates into practical advantages such as high-speed payments in wrapped $BTC with low fees, access to DeFi primitives like swaps, lending, and staking, plus NFT and gaming dApps. These applications are built in Rust using familiar SVM tooling. That said, the design also targets developers who already work within the broader btc smart contracts ecosystem.

SPL-compatible tokens are adapted for the Layer 2, giving Solana-native builders a straightforward migration path into the Bitcoin universe without a full code rewrite. This alignment aims to accelerate bitcoin layer two adoption by lowering friction for teams that already understand SVM-based development. Moreover, it seeks to keep developers within the broader Bitcoin orbit rather than losing them permanently to alternative Layer 1s.

From low-fee transactions to market momentum

The project pitches itself as a scalability layer that enables low fee btc transactions alongside high throughput. That promise matters for traders who want responsive DeFi experiences and for gamers who cannot tolerate long settlement times. If successful, Bitcoin Hyper could become one of the more visible examples of a bitcoin layer 2 translating long-term conviction into actual utility.

On the market side, the bitcoin hyper presale has already raised over $28.8M, with tokens currently offered at $0.013365. That fundraising tally signals robust demand for a BTC-centric scalability play that anchors to the main chain while using SVM for execution. However, it also sets expectations high for future delivery on the technical roadmap.

Whale participation has added to the buzz, with one large investor recently purchasing over $500K worth of $HYPER tokens. Supporters frame this as a sign that bigger players see potential in Bitcoin-aligned high-throughput infrastructure. Meanwhile, the team highlights that yet another presale price increase is scheduled within hours, positioning current pricing as a temporary discount.

For those looking beyond short-term trading, projections inside the community point to significant upside. By the end of 2026, some forecasts suggest $HYPER could reach $0.20, which would represent a 1396% increase from its current presale level. That said, these numbers remain speculative and depend heavily on execution, adoption, and the broader digital asset cycle.

Outlook for Bitcoin-aligned scaling ecosystems

Bitcoin Hyper’s SVM-powered design is part of a wider push to deliver bitcoin layer two scalability without diluting Bitcoin’s settlement assurances. As Fed-driven narratives fade in importance, more attention is likely to fall on which scaling stacks can host real economic activity at scale. In that environment, projects that marry throughput, programmability, and security could capture outsized mindshare.

In summary, O’Leary’s comments underline a broader shift from macro speculation to concrete infrastructure around $BTC. If Bitcoin is to matter regardless of Fed timing, then the platforms that let users spend, trade, and build on top of it will define the next phase of growth. Bitcoin Hyper aims to be one of those platforms by linking SVM performance with Bitcoin settlement, turning long-term conviction into high-speed, application-ready utility.