An opportunity worth tens of billions

Bitcoin is still dominating the crypto space with nearly 60% of the total crypto market cap is currently held in BTC. While DeFi Total Value Locked (TVL) reaches to 9.45B, Bitcoin’s market cap is still 20 times larger than DeFi. There are many projects trying to create a bridge between BTC to Ethereum with WBTC capturing 70% of the market share, which requires significant trust on the custodian of the BTC being wrapped. BTC holders as well as Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin are worried about censorship risk with centralized wrapped BTC and demanding a trustless solution.

How does tBTC work?

Instead, tBTC enables a much more decentralized solution for bridging BTC to Ethereum. tBTC is an ERC-20 token that can be used in Ethereum and each tBTC token is fully backed and matched by at least 1 BTC held in reserve. The protocol works by allowing the user to mint tBTC by depositing BTC into a multisig address on the Bitcoin blockchain. The multsig address is controlled by those signers who are randomly selected among all eligible signers by a random beacon to ensure decentralisation. Each signer is also required to hold the “work token” KEEP to become a node as well as 150% of the BTC’s value in ETH.

Safety is the top priority

tBTC had to pause its May launch after the team found an issue in the redemption flow. After the incident, instead of rushing into the market to capture the “hotness” of yield farming, the team decided to conduct 3 months rigorous testing and 3 audits by ConsenSys Diligence, Trail of Bits and Sergei Delgado.

IOSG Ventures a strong believer in the great potential bridging BTC and the DeFi ecosystem

IOSG is delighted to announce that we have invested in Keep Network and IOSG will actively participate in the Keep ecosystem, helping to build community and drive adoption and awareness, especially in the Asian market.

Jocy Lin, IOSG Ventures co-founder commented that “tBTC is precisely the type of project we are excited to support as it creates a much-needed decentralized bridge between Bitcoin and the DeFi ecosystem on Ethereum. We believe there will great growth potential with Keep’s unique random beacon and ECDSA technology and the cooperation between IOSG Ventures and tBTC will contributing to the accelerating growth of the open finance community. ”

About IOSG:

Founded in 2017, IOSG Ventures is research and community-driven with offices across China, US, Singapore and Germany. We focus on Open Finance, Web3.0 and cross-chain ecosystems, investing in teams with top potential worldwide. Our portfolio covers more than 60 projects, including Layer-1 blockchains (Near, Polkadot, Cosmos), middleware (Celer, Raiden, Reach) and applications including Defi (MakerDAO, Synthetix, UMA). We have been actively involved in various developer & DAO communities. We believe in long-term partnership and we work closely with our portfolios to advise and support them along their journey of entrepreneurship.