Avalanche Bridge to Introduce Support for Native Bitcoin and Widen Opportunities for BTC in AVAX DeFi Ecosystem

Avalanche (AVAX), a leading smart contract platform recently announced that its Avalanche Bridge will expand support for the Bitcoin network to allow BTC holders to securely transfer the assets onto the Avalanche public blockchain.

Avalanche Bridge to Support Native Bitcoin

The Avalanche Bridge is set to become the gateway for bitcoin holders to interact with the flourishing Avalanche DeFi ecosystem without having to part away with their BTC.

In a recent announcement, Avalanche stated that their Bridge will enable BTC holders to interact with its DeFi ecosystem which currently commands a TVL of almost $16 billion.

Notably, the feature is expected to be launched in Q2 2022 when the digital assets industry will witness Bitcoin join Ethereum as supported networks on the Avalanche Bridge.

In essence, by expanding support to the Bitcoin network, the Avalanche Bridge will unlock a trillion-dollar asset that is yet to fully join Web3 and DeFi culture applications at the scale of user demand.

For the uninitiated, the Avalanche Bridge was launched in July 2021 and has become the most popular Ethereum-connected bridge by TVL, exceeding $6 billion as of March 22.

To date, the Bridge has been used for more than 243,000 transactions to enable more than $43 billion in ERC-20 assets on Ethereum to be used on Avalanche.

Commenting on the development, Nick Mussallem, Head of Product at Ava Labs, said:

“The Avalanche Bridge has established a seamless, secure, and low-fee rail for users of all sizes to explore Avalanche and the rapidly growing ecosystem of applications on the platform. Avalanche’s unique architecture makes it an ideal on-chain home for institutions who demand high-performance, and I believe opening the rails for Bitcoin will open their eyes to even greater possibilities.”

More About the Avalanche Bridge

It should be mentioned that since its launch, the Avalanche Bridge has become a central piece of infrastructure for the wider Avalanche community as it continues to introduce innovative features to make the ecosystem more robust.

For instance, it introduced an innovative security model that leverages Intel SGX technology to usher in a new era of bridge technology. The security model was designed to cater to the following demands:

• Secure: the bridge must be audited and built with security-first technologies.
• Cost Effective: the cost for bridging assets should be low.
• Fast: the transaction should take the least amount of time possible.
• Transparent: users should be informed of the transfer status at every step of the process.
• Intuitive: users new to crypto asset transfers can easily understand the steps to use the bridge.
• Ecosystem-supportive: upon crossing the bridge, users should see a full suite of applications and capabilities across the Avalanche ecosystem and experience minimal friction in seizing opportunities.
• Multi-chain: the bridge will support a growing number of blockchains in the future to center Avalanche at the core of DeFi.

In addition, more enhancements are being made to make the Bridge more secure and robust. These include expanding the number of Wardens who decentralize security and verification of Bridge operations.

In similar news, crypto.news reported on March 9 that Avalanche had unveiled a $290 million incentive program to foster subnet adoption.