Crypto infrastructure platform Threshold has rolled out a major upgrade to its tBTC bridge, aimed at incentivizing institutions to put their billions of dollars in Bitcoin to work for decentralized financial protocols.
Threshold’s latest upgrade now allows institutions to issue tBTC directly on supported chains in a single Bitcoin (BTC) transaction, with no secondary approvals and no gas fees, while redemptions to the Bitcoin network are just as simple, Threshold said in a statement.
Threshold’s head of marketing, Rizza Carla Ramos, went deeper in an interview with Cointelegraph at Web Summit in Lisbon this week, explaining that the feature improvements could entice more Bitcoin-holding institutions to put their BTC to work in DeFi instead of just leaving it there and waiting for it to appreciate:
“They’ll want loans, they want returns, because if they’re investing in Bitcoin for the long term, you don’t want it to sit there, right?
“You want to be able to have liquidity, you want to be able to have depth with your assets, you want your assets to actually generate profits for you.”
“This is how we’re going to build the next level of funding for Bitcoin, by allowing institutions to get this part of the market on-chain,” she added.
BTC can migrate to Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base and more
Every tBTC issued is verifiably backed 1:1 by Bitcoin, with no middleman or custodian risk, implementing a threshold rule where at least 51 out of 100 Bitcoin node operators must sign the transaction for it to be valid. This could allow over $500 billion in institutional and whale-held Bitcoin to move to Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, Sui, and other blockchains to pursue DeFi opportunities.
Threshold has seen over $4.2 billion in cumulative volume cross its tBTC bridge since its launch five years ago.
It competes with Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) and renBTC (RENBTC), which have seen much higher transaction volume than Threshold but operate on a more centralized model for moving Bitcoin between other blockchains.
WBTC made its own move on Thursday, expanding to Hedera to bring more liquidity and Bitcoin tokenization opportunities to the high-speed chain.
Bitcoin will also help DeFi
Threshold also argued that tBTC would make the decentralized finance space more robust, as Bitcoin would increase liquidity in decentralized exchange pools and lending protocols while enabling more sustainable returns.
