The Nomic DAO Foundation announced the launch of Ethereum support on Nomic’s decentralized custody engine for Bitcoin. This will enable seamless BTC on-and-off-ramping into Ethereum, bringing Bitcoin to the largest ecosystem in decentralized finance (DeFi). Starting with a testnet released today, Nomic will facilitate native Bitcoin deposits and withdrawals on Ethereum, without relying on centralized custodians.
Traditionally, to use BTC on Ethereum, users have had to obtain wrapped bitcoin (WBTC), an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain that is pegged to real Bitcoin. Each WBTC is backed 1:1 with Bitcoin, which is held in reserve by a centralized custodian. Recently, amid centralization concerns with custodians holding all the keys to the multisig for WBTC worth $9.2 billion, the broader DeFi community has pushed for users to consider new decentralized alternatives.
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“Bitcoin is the highest-value crypto asset, and Ethereum is the highest-value DeFi ecosystem. I’m excited to see Nomic bring its products to Ethereum, including the native and decentralized nBTC asset, and seamless one-step BTC deposits,” said Matt Bell, . “It’s time to move beyond the current centralized and clunky BTC-on-Ethereum offerings, and start truly bringing Bitcoin into DeFi.”
In addition to bringing Bitcoin into Ethereum through nBTC, this upgrade introduces a new framework for protocols to leverage Nomic’s decentralized custody engine. Previously, to build Bitcoin DeFi solutions, protocol developers had to rely on centralized MPC providers or basic multisig setups to hold BTC, which presented trust and decentralization challenges. Now, with Nomic’s decentralized custody engine, protocols can easily create Bitcoin-backed assets at a lower cost, providing a trust-minimized solution to accelerate Bitcoin DeFi growth on Ethereum and other EVM chains.
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This upgrade also paves the way for future bridging to other EVM-based chains, expanding the reach and utility of nBTC across ecosystems that represent more than $46 billion in total value locked (TVL).
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