Lombard acquires Avalanche Bitcoin bridge asset 'BTC.b'

Lombard, an on-chain finance platform based on Bitcoin (BTC), announced on the 31st that it has acquired the infrastructure of Avalanche (AVAX) Bitcoin bridge asset 'BTC.b' from Ava Labs. Bridge assets are tokenized assets created to connect different blockchain networks.

BTC.b is a Bitcoin token circulating on Avalanche, with a scale of about $538 million. BTC.b has played a key role in Avalanche's decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem since its launch in 2022 and is integrated with major protocols such as Aave and GMX. Existing contracts and integration structures will be maintained after this acquisition, so users can continue to use the service without changes.

This transaction is the first case of an asset infrastructure that is actually operating on-chain being acquired. Through the acquisition, BTC.b will be migrated to Lombard's protocol infrastructure and is expected to expand to other mainnets such as Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), and MegaEth in the future.

Also, BTC.b will be transferred to Lombard's decentralized consortium security architecture involving 15 institutions. Cross-chain bridging via Chainlink (LINK) interoperability protocol (CCIP) and 1:1 Bitcoin reserve verification through a proof system will be applied. In addition, BTC.b will be integrated into Lombard's Vault product suite and software development kit (SDK) and is expected to be used on major exchanges such as Binance and Bybit.

Jacob Phillips, co-founder of Lombard, said, "Bitcoin is the largest asset by market capitalization, but most of it is inactive," and added, "Through this BTC.b infrastructure acquisition, we will enable Bitcoin to be used more productively on-chain."

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