jakiro
Author: Haotian; Source: X, @tmel0211
Since the Buidlpad public sale has been launched, Lombard has been discussed recently.There is a voice called Lombard $BARD to Bitcoin, just like stablecoin giants such as Circle and Tether to the US dollar, and this category is quite in place.How to understand this positioning?
In simple terms, Lombard aims to be under the established trend of large-scale global assets being launched.Striving to be the infrastructure layer of Bitcoin liquidity, in fact, it is to lock in the discourse power of the next narrative cycle.
1) $LBTC is familiar to many people. It is the only BTC protocol accepted by AAVE. It took 92 days to achieve a TVL of $1 billion and introduced more than $2 billion in liquidity to more than 12 public chains, accounting for 57% of the entire Bitcoin LST market share.
These data actually verifies one thing:Lombard is activated from sleepy BTC assets through LBTC.Going back to the tone at the beginning of the article, LBTC’s ambition is not a Bitcoin LST pledged token. To put it bluntly, its goal is to lock in the $2.2 trillion BTC market.Through the evolutionary path of “products” and “platforms” infrastructure, the monopoly position of stablecoin giants Circle and Tether is replicated..
Looking back on the successful transformation path of Tether and Circle, we first use USDC/USDT to occupy the market, then become the actual issuer and allocator of the “on-chain USD”, and finally integrate into the entire web3 ecosystem of DeFi protocol, CEX, and DApp applications.
By analogy, it is obvious that Lombard’s LBTC aspirations are the same, striving to be the “global gate” of BTC liquidity.
2) In terms of infrastructure layer, Lombard has built a full-stack solution of “consortium chain + SDK + DeFi market”.In fact, at this point, there is both a alliance chain and a DeFi protocol market, and you can vaguely feel Lombard’s “pragmatic” approach in the current fundamentalist pursuit of capital efficiency cycle.
Taking the alliance chain ledger Lombard Ledger as an example, it was jointly verified by 14 top institutions including OKX, Galaxy, DCG, Wintermute, Antpool, F2pool, etc.In essence, it does not pursue absolute decentralization in technology, but realizes business checks and balances through competitive and cooperative relationships between institutions..
This is also Make Sense. Exchanges are competitors themselves, and market makers need to arbitrage on different platforms. Mining pools represent the fulcrum of BTC infra. Any party’s actions will damage their core business.
Therefore, Lombard Ledger acts as a “quasi-L2” layer of BTC, which is different from layer2, which pursues inheriting the security of BTC mainnet in the traditional sense.What it locks in is how to support the full-chain liquidity of Bitcoin at the level of capital efficiency.In addition, the Lombard SDK allows any chain, protocol or wallet to directly embed native BTC deposit and income functions, which is equivalent to “empowering” every chain with the ability of Bitcoin Layer2.
I feel that Lombard has found a balance between decentralization and institutional needs through the alliance chain ledger. This is not necessary to hide it at all under the encrypted narrative led by Wall Street institutions today.In fact, it is to use institutional thinking to do institutional business.
3) Finally, I have to talk about the problem of the innate shortcomings of the native narrative of Bitcoin ecosystem.For example, Babylon has a grand and sexy narrative, using cryptography magic technology to enable BTC to realize native pledge; Solv Protocol has taken the route of aggregated liquidity, encapsulating various BTCs as SolvBTC to solve the problem of liquidity dispersion.
Including Lombard’s commercial pragmatic approach, if you only focus on Crypto’s native infield, you always feel a little unsatisfied.After all, if we assume that the prosperity of a BTC ecosystem is based on pricing and valuation, everyone will be passive..
The essence of the problem is:BTCFi is still in the “play your own” stage and lacks real external capital injection.
therefore,This wave of Lombard’s series of actions has the meaning of breaking out of the siege of pure Crypto native narrative, for example, it withdraws from institutional products such as tokenized options and pledged ETFs.The goal of these products is clear – allowing traditional financial institutions to participate in BTCFi, without even understanding what DeFi is and what LST is. Perhaps you only need to know that this ETF can provide 8-10% BTC-based returns.
To a certain extent, first, institutional funds can be allowed to allocate crypto assets in compliance, and then gradually guide them to participate in on-chain activities, so that the products and services provided can be directly connected to the fund pool of traditional finance.
Let external funds move on their own, and you don’t have to wait for the uncertain future of native BTC’s “ecological prosperity”.
