Threshold Upgrades tBTC bridge for Institutional Bitcoin DeFi

Crypto infrastructure platform Threshold has rolled out a major update for its tBTC bridge, aimed at incentivizing institutions to put their billions of Bitcoin dollars to work in decentralized financial protocols.

Threshold’s latest update now allows institutions to mint tBTC directly to supported chains in a single Bitcoin (BTC) transactions, without secondary approval and without gas fees, while redemptions back to the Bitcoin network are equally simple, Threshold said in a statement.

Threshold’s head of marketing, Rizza Carla Ramos, went into more depth in an interview with Cointelegraph at the Web Summit in Lisbon this week, explaining that the feature improvements could incentivize more institutions that hold Bitcoin to put their BTC. to work in DeFi instead of letting it sit there and waiting for it to appreciate:

“They’re going to see loans, they want returns because if they’re investing for Bitcoin long-term, you don’t just 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 profit for you.”

“That’s how we’re going to build that next level of finance for Bitcoin, allowing institutions to get that market share on the chain,” he added.

BTC can go to Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, and more

Each minted tBTC is verifiably backed 1:1 by Bitcoin, without intermediaries or risk of custodians, implementing a threshold rule where at least 51 out of 100 Bitcoin node operators must sign the transaction to be valid. It could empower more than $500 billion in institutional and whale Bitcoin to move into Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, Sui and other blockchains to pursue. DeFi opportunities.

Related: Altcoins are not dead; long live altcoins

Threshold has seen over $4.2 billion in cumulative volume cross its tBTC bridge since it launched five years ago.

It competes with Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) and renBTC (RENBTC), which have seen much higher trading volumes than Threshold, but operate on a more centralized model to move Bitcoin to other blockchains.