Interlay aims to advance Bitcoin’s DeFi potential with new interoperable bridge

Interlay, a newly appointed Polkadot (DOT) parachain community, is nearing the completion of a two-year Bitcoin (BTC) bridge growth challenge on Polkadot, with the launch announcement on its sandbox platform Kusama.

Additionally, Interlay has built-in a Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC) digital asset, often called kBTC, on their Canary parachain Kintsugi. The asset is already obtainable for buying and selling on different Polkadot parachains Karura, ruled by Acala, and Moonriver, ruled by Moonbeam.

It is anticipated that Interlay will search to deploy its expertise throughout each Cosmos and Ethereum through the coming yr to improve interoperability between chains.

As lots of you realize, kBTC is our flagship product on @kusamanetwork. kBTC is a 1:1 BTC-backed asset on Kusama, maintained by a decentralized community of collateralized vaults. KSM would be the first of many collateral to safe kBTC❗️

Detailed evaluation https://t.co/AT8yC4iQqC

— Interlay #interBTC (@InterlayHQ) March 24, 2022

Alexei Zamyatin, the co-founder and CEO of Interlay, said:

“There is 14 billion USD price of Bitcoin ‘DeFi’ on Ethereum, managed by a handful of centralized custodians, behind KYC, with no treatment for customers or DApps if one thing goes fallacious. Even large gamers like Maker, Compound and Aave implicitly belief a number of tradiFi establishments.”

The preliminary growth of this challenge was financially supported by an undisclosed, up-to-$100,000 Web3 Foundation grant issued in March 2020.

Related: How Polkadot’s parachain auctions make a decentralized Web3 doable

Following this, the interoperability challenge was the topic of two capital raises, each a $3 million seed spherical in July 2021 and a Series A $6.5 million spherical in December 2021. At the time of the latter, the founding father of CEO of lead contributor DFG Capital, James Wo said that Interlay’s resolution will “develop the cross-chain potentialities for Bitcoin.”

In February, Interlay was introduced among the many winners of Polkadot’s tenth parachain public sale slot, securing in extra of two.7 million DOT tokens from almost 20,000 individuals.