Lates News

On March 25th, Lombard and Bitwise Asset Management announced a partnership at the New York Digital Asset Summit to offer institutional clients a solution to earn income and collateralize BTC loans without moving assets out of custody. The goal is to cover the institutional custody of BTC assets. Bitwise will develop a strategy that combines DeFi lending with tokenizing real-world assets, and the decentralized lending protocol Morpho will provide the infrastructure for BTC collateralized lending. The platform uses tools native to Bitcoin such as partially signed transactions and time locks to verify collateral, allowing positions to be represented on-chain without transferring or re-pledging underlying assets. Phillips stated that Bitcoin Smart Accounts can simultaneously reduce custody, cross-chain bridge, and counterparty risks. The solution is aimed at high net-worth individuals, asset management institutions, and corporate treasuries, and is expected to launch in the second quarter of 2026, adding more custodians and protocols to expand coverage. Lombard estimates that around $500 billion of BTC is held in institutional custody; DefiLlama data shows that the total locked value of BTC in DeFi is around $2.93 billion, with a market value of around $1.4 trillion; as of the time of writing, Babylon Protocol has a total locked value of around $2.8 billion, with Lombard contributing around $744 million.