Lombard Finance acquires BTC.b, Avalanche's bridged bitcoin asset, from Ava Labs

Lombard Finance, the Bitcoin DeFi protocol behind the liquid staking token LBTC, has acquired BTC.b — Avalanche’s bridged bitcoin asset and infrastructure — from Ava Labs to expand its offerings.

BTC.b , launched in 2022, currently has a market cap of about $502 million and is integrated across DeFi protocols including Aave, BENQI, and LFJ. Under the new arrangement, BTC.b will remain operational on Avalanche, with its contract, name, and integrations unchanged, while transitioning to Lombard’s technical infrastructure.

Ava Labs said the move will let it focus on its core business. “We are offloading some costs and effort to running a very large piece of infrastructure and focusing on our core business — maintaining and improving the Avalanche blockchain,” Eric Kang, head of DeFi at Ava Labs, told The Block. “Lombard is much more well-suited to grow the asset going forward and adding additional capabilities like custody support, developer onboarding, multichain support, etc. via the Lombard SDK [software development kit].”

For Lombard, the deal expands its product suite and advances its goal of building onchain bitcoin capital markets, Lombard co-founder Jacob Phillips told The Block. “The Bitcoin DeFi market is still nascent with less than 1% of bitcoin’s $2.1 trillion+ market cap active onchain. This acquisition positions Lombard to capture significant market share as institutional and retail adoption accelerates,” Phillips said.

BTC.b is a permissionless, non-yield bitcoin asset, while Lombard’s LBTC is a yield-bearing bitcoin token with a market cap of over $1.3 billion currently. With both BTC.b and LBTC, Lombard now becomes the only platform offering both yield and non-yield bitcoin assets — permissionless and across multiple chains, Phillips said.

“Critically, BTC.b addresses a significant market gap. Centralized alternatives like cbBTC and WBTC do not offer permissionless minting,” he said. “This creates barriers for developers who want to bring bitcoin to their protocols. BTC.b solves this.”

Through the Lombard SDK, developers can onboard bitcoin directly into their protocols, Phillips said. At launch, BTC.b will serve as the canonical bitcoin on MegaETH , he noted. “The Lombard team will drive BTC.b’s growth across chains and protocols going forward,” he added.

Discussions between Lombard and Ava Labs began in the second quarter, and the transaction is expected to close before year-end, Phillips said. He declined to share deal terms, including size and financing details. The transaction was handled internally by each company’s business and legal teams, with no banking advisors involved, he added.

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