Lombard Finance acquires BTC.b from Ava Labs
Acryptoinvest.news: Lombard Finance, the Bitcoin DeFi protocol behind the liquid staking token LBTC, has acquired BTC.b—Avalanche's unified Bitcoin asset and infrastructure—from Ava Labs to expand its offerings.
BTC.b, which launched in 2022, currently has a market cap of approximately $502 million and is integrated with DeFi protocols including Aave, BENQI, and LFJ. Under the new agreement, BTC.b will continue to operate on the Avalanche platform, retaining its contract, name, and integrations unchanged, while migrating to Lombard's technical infrastructure.
Ava Labs stated that this move will allow it to focus on its core business. “We're offloading some of the costs and effort of managing a very large piece of infrastructure and focusing on our core business—supporting and improving the Avalanche blockchain,” said Eric Kang, head of DeFi at Ava Labs. “Lombard is much better positioned to further develop the asset and add additional capabilities, such as custodial support, developer engagement, cross-chain support, etc., through the Lombard SDK [software development kit].”
Lombard co-founder Jacob Phillips explained that this deal expands the company's product line and furthers its goal of creating on-chain Bitcoin capital markets. “The Bitcoin DeFi market is still in its infancy, with less than 1% of Bitcoin's $2.1 trillion market cap currently on-chain. This acquisition will allow Lombard to capture significant market share as institutional and retail adoption accelerates,” Phillips said.
BTC.b is a public, non-yielding Bitcoin asset, while Lombard's LBTC is a yield-bearing Bitcoin token with a current market cap of over $1.3 billion. According to Phillips, with the launch of BTC.b and LBTC, Lombard becomes the only platform offering both yield-bearing and non-yielding Bitcoin assets—public and across chains.
“BTC.b is critical to solving a significant market problem. Centralized alternatives like cbBTC and WBTC do not offer permissionless mining capabilities,” he said. “This creates barriers for developers wanting to implement Bitcoin into their protocols. BTC.b solves this problem.”
Phillips noted that the Lombard SDK allows developers to directly integrate Bitcoin into their protocols. At launch, BTC.b will become the canonical Bitcoin on MegaETH, he noted. “Going forward, the Lombard team will support the growth of BTC.b across all blockchains and protocols,” he added.
Negotiations between Lombard and Ava Labs began in the second quarter, and the deal is expected to close by the end of the year, Phillips said. He declined to disclose the terms of the deal, including its size and financing details. He added that the transaction was negotiated internally by each company's business units and legal departments, without the involvement of bank advisers.
The Funding Newsletter: Stay on top of the latest news and trends in crypto venture capital and M&A with my free bi-monthly newsletter, The Funding.
Source: cryptonews.net
