I’ve been in this space long enough to have seen every possible “Bitcoin DeFi” pitch come and go. Wrapped BTC on Ethereum, liquid staking on Stacks, synthetic BTC on Solana, custodial lending on BlockFi (RIP), you name it. They all shared the same fatal flaw: at some point you had to hand your keys to somebody else or pray that a multi-sig of strangers wouldn’t rug you. I never meets in real life.
Then @undefined showed up and basically said, “Cool story, but what if your BTC literally never leaves its original address and still earns yield?” I thought it was marketing fluff until I actually went through the contracts. Turns out they weren’t kidding.
Here’s the trick in plain English. You send BTC to a vault address that is 100% controlled by transparent, verifiable Bitcoin script (no federation, no multisig humans, no off-chain servers). In return you get a token called btcAL that represents your claim. That btcAL can now wander around BNB Chain, Ethereum, Arbitrum, wherever, and plug into any money market or DEX like a normal ERC20. Meanwhile the original BTC sits untouched on Bitcoin Layer 1, earning whatever the vault is making from putting it to work. When you’re done, you burn the btcAL and the vault sends your exact BTC back to whatever address you choose. Zero custody handoff, zero wrapping shenanigans.
Where the yield actually comes from is refreshingly boring. Right now the vault is mostly farming Binance’s BTCB liquid staking program (the same one half of Asia already uses), parking some in isolated lending pools on Venus, and dipping into stable-yield strategies whenever volatility spikes. Nothing that can 100x your money overnight, but also nothing that can liquidate you if the market dumps 20%. Current blend is floating between 5-9% depending on the week, paid out in BTC, not in some random governance token.
The $Bank token (cointag $Bank) is the part most people sleep on. It isn’t another “vote to earn” meme. A big slice of every dollar the vault earns gets market-bought into $Bank and handed to people who lock it. So the more BTC the protocol secures, the more real revenue flows to $Bank holders. Supply is tiny compared to most launches, and the emission curve looks like something from 2019, not 2024. That alone makes it stick out in a sea of hyper-inflated farm coins.
What surprised me most is how fast institutions are sniffing around. TVL crossed $220 million in under six weeks with almost no marketing beyond a couple of Chinese Telegram groups and some quiet KOL posts. Feels like the same pattern we saw with Pendle and EigenLayer: sleepy at first, then suddenly everyone is using it and pretending they were early.
I still keep 90% of my Bitcoin in cold storage doing absolutely nothing, because paranoia dies hard. But the remaining 10% is now sitting in Lorenzo earning more than my savings account ever did, and I never had to trust a single human along the way. In a cycle where every chain is begging for Bitcoin liquidity, having a solution that doesn’t require Bitcoin holders to compromise on security feels like the first idea that actually makes sense.
Not telling you to go ape in. Just saying that for the first time in years, Bitcoin finally has a yield layer that doesn’t feel like a compromise.
