Threshold: Upgraded bridge to funnel $500B institutional BTC into DeFi

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

Threshold’s latest upgrade now enables institutions to mint tBTC directly to supported chains in a single Bitcoin (BTC) transaction, without secondary approvals and without gas fees, while redemptions back to the Bitcoin network are equally as straightforward, 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 Bitcoin-holding institutions to put their BTC to work in DeFi instead of just letting it sit there and waiting for it to appreciate:

“They’re going to be wanting lending, they want yields on it because if they’re investing for Bitcoin in the long run, you don’t just want it sitting 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, by allowing the institutions to get that part of the market onchain,” she added.

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

Every tBTC minted is verifiably backed 1:1 by Bitcoin, with no middlemen or custodian risk, by implementing a threshold rule where at least 51 out of 100 Bitcoin node operators must sign the transaction for it to be valid. It could empower more than $500 billion in institutional and whale-held Bitcoin to move into Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, Sui and other blockchains to chase DeFi opportunities.

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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 far more trading volume than Threshold but operate on a more centralized model to move Bitcoin across other blockchains.