I used to think that Bitcoin was kind of like those landlords in old neighborhoods:

They own a bunch of properties, worth two trillion, but just won’t rent them out.
Why? They don’t trust agents, don’t want to look at contracts, don’t want to get scammed.
That’s exactly the current state of most BTC holders when it comes to DeFi.
The previous attempts to wrap Bitcoin had obvious issues:
You had to be KYC’d and get approvals
Everything was decided by a single institution
If anything went wrong, small investors had no say at all

So the result is:
DeFi is booming, but the on-chain utilization rate of Bitcoin is less than 1%.
Now @Lombard_Finance didn’t follow the old path,
They didn’t issue a new XXXBTC, but instead directly accepted BTC.b from Avalanche:
A project that’s been around for years
Circulating nearly $540 million, with real usage in DeFi
Community, users, and ecosystem are all established
Then they did two things based on this:
Security upgrade:
Moved from single-institution custody to 15 institutions jointly securing,
No longer a “single person holding the master key” setup.

Multi-chain expansion:
Leveraging infrastructure like Chainlink to bring BTC.b from Avalanche
to Ethereum, Solana, and other chains.
For existing users: the interface stays the same, the tokens stay the same, the experience stays the same—everything works as usual.
For the industry as a whole, it’s like swapping out the engine at the foundational level:
On-chain Bitcoin finally has a more decentralized version, functioning more like “public infrastructure.”

Next time you hear the term “on-chain Bitcoin capital markets,”
BTC.b’s handover and upgrade by Lombard will most likely be an unavoidable starting point.