For the better part of a decade, the core ethos of a true Bitcoiner was beautifully simple: HODL. You acquire it, you secure it in cold storage, and you never, ever sell it. It was a strategy of patient accumulation. But this created a dilemma. Your net worth could be soaring, but you were still cash-poor. All your wealth was locked away in this powerful, but dormant, asset. What if you could use its power without selling it? This is the problem that decentralized finance (DeFi) solved, and it fundamentally changed Bitcoin's DNA. Protocols like Aave and Maker created a kind of financial alchemy. They allowed you to take your dormant Bitcoin, lock it in a transparent, automated vault (a smart contract), and use its value to mint new, liquid assets stablecoins. It was the birth of productive Bitcoin. I think of it like this: your Bitcoin is a sleeping dragon on a massive hoard of gold. For years, the only strategy was to let the dragon sleep, hoping its hoard would grow. DeFi lending is a spell that lets you borrow some of that gold's power without waking the dragon. You can take that borrowed power (stablecoins) and use it for anything yield farming, buying a different asset, or even paying for real-world expenses. All the while, your dragon (your BTC stack) is still safely asleep in its vault, hopefully growing in value. The catch? If the dragon's hoard shrinks too much (a major price drop), the spell breaks, and the vault claims a portion of your dragon to cover the loan. This is liquidation. It's high-stakes magic. So, how do I track this phenomenon? I watch the total amount of 'sleeping dragons' being put into these magic vaults. On data platforms like DefiLlama, you can see the total value of Bitcoin locked in lending protocols. When that number rises, it’s a powerful signal. It means more and more of the world's most pristine collateral is being taken off the market and put to productive use. It’s a massive driver of demand and a reducer of liquid supply. This is the second act of Bitcoin's story. It's the evolution from a simple, passive store of value into the foundational, pristine collateral layer for a new, open financial system. It’s the moment we learned how to not just own the dragon, but how to harness its power. And that changes everything.