RIF, the utility token for smart contract network RSK, shot up over 30% in price after an appearance by its founder on the Jan. 13 edition of The Pomp Podcast. The gain equates to a $36 million increase in market cap for RIF, most of which has occurred in the last 12 hours.

RIF, short for “RSK Infrastructure Framework,” is the token used as payment for decentralized infrastructure services which operate under the RSK protocol, such as e-commerce solutions and network bridges. Services are purchased at a marketplace hosted by the network and are constructed using RSK’s protocol. This renders them interoperable among a number of smart contract-enabled platforms like Ethereum and EOS.

During the hour-long interview RSK and IOVLabs founder Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar discussed the origins of his fascination with Bitcoin, the genesis of RSK and IOVLabs, and why he is confident that 2021 will be a productive year in terms of readying Bitcoin’s infrastructure for mass adoption.

He also fielded questions from listeners and offered his opinion on a number of hot subjects, including censorship by service providers, DeFi, and what he thought the endgame should be for developers in his industry.

“The first decentralized finance protocol is Bitcoin. The ultimate goal is to provide all the financial services that today exist in centralized models, to provide them in a peer-to-peer, decentralized fashion.”

Gutierrez-Zaldivar praised Ethereum’s successes while reiterating his long-held belief that Bitcoin should be the base layer for development of smart contracts running on decentralized networks. His conclusion is based on six years experience developing bridges to connect independent crypto platforms.

“I am fully in line with the objectives of Ethereum. Maybe the main difference is I think the bottom layer should be Bitcoin, because you need a store of value that is as censorship-resistant — as neutral — as possible.”

With a roadmap for RSK that extends over a decade into the future, Gutierrez-Zaldivar stressed a long-term mindset for his company and hopes that one day it will be “an important protection layer for the Bitcoin economy and infrastructure.”

Gutierrez-Zaldivar believes that RSK reflects a culmination of advances made in decentralized software and that in 2021 all of the components necessary for “crypto systems to work exactly as fintech” are available, with the last step getting the systems to converge.

“These technologies have the potential of including half of the population that is excluded today by the financial system and therefore doomed to be poor forever, because they don’t have the means to progress and grow. That’s why I think this is so relevant and that’s why we are doing what we do.”

On Jan. 6, Binance announced that it would list RIF trading pairs. The price of RIF is currently up 40% since the start of the year.