Recently, Azu has become increasingly certain about one thing: the next round of competition for BTCFi will not be about who can write prettier annualized returns, but rather who can turn the 'earning potential of BTC' into the infrastructure of various new public chains. For a new chain, ETH liquidity can be cultivated gradually through incentives, but BTC liquidity often needs to be drawn in through 'lower friction, higher trust, and stronger cross-chain usability'; and assets like stBTC, which carry a narrative of returns and can serve as collateral and trading materials in DeFi, once made default available across multiple chains, essentially allows BTC to have a certain kind of 'native interest rate layer' in these new ecosystems.
The reason I place Wormhole/Portal at the starting point of all this is that Lorenzo has directly made stBTC and enzoBTC 'whitelisted assets' in the Wormhole ecosystem and publicly disclosed that they account for 50% of the cross-chain BTC assets in Wormhole. Ethereum has also been set as the canonical chain for Lorenzo's assets, allowing users to migrate assets from Ethereum to Sui and BNB Chain using Wormhole's Portal Token Bridge. To me, this is not just 'another bridge', but Lorenzo striving for a rarer qualification: to become the 'standard configuration' in the list of cross-chain BTC assets.
Sui here is more like a typical model: when stBTC can cross-chain reach and form usable depth, on-chain applications will be willing to design products treating it as a long-term asset. Lorenzo's Wormhole announcement provided very specific early landing data, such as there are already 1,000 enzoBTC and 500 stBTC launched on Sui, achieving a milestone of about 1 million dollars in stBTC liquidity; subsequently, they announced a partnership with NAVI Protocol to launch a lending pool for stBTC, directly embedding 'yield-bearing BTC' into the core financial scenarios of the Move ecosystem. In other words, Sui is not 'introducing a BTC token', but is introducing a layer of yield that can continuously supply the use value of BTC.
The collaboration of Scroll reflects another logic: what EVM L2 needs is 'incremental composable assets', rather than just a simple TVL number. Lorenzo announced the completion of the integration of stBTC and Scroll in July 2024, emphasizing that stBTC can already bridge between Lorenzo and Scroll, while using Scroll's 'over 1 billion dollars bridged TVL' to illustrate why this is a new ecosystem capable of accommodating BTC assets. For Scroll, the significance of stBTC lies in providing developers with a more advanced underlying material — it is not static BTC, but BTC that can continue to layer products around yield and liquidity efficiency.
Putting these pieces together, you will see Lorenzo doing something very 'public chain perspective': it is not just sprinkling liquidity everywhere and leaving, but providing a 'BTC yield base' for new chains, allowing them to do lending, market-making, derivatives, and structured products around stBTC/enzoBTC. Even in the ecosystem update of 2025, they mentioned that enzoBTC and stBTC will launch on the Hemi mainnet and be available as assets on the first day of the mainnet, this rhythm is essentially treating themselves as the 'financial standard component for BTC' at the launch of a new chain.
The rules are becoming clearer: new public chains are no longer just competing on who has more native applications, but are starting to compete on who can more quickly access 'sustainable yield layers of high-quality external assets'; BTC is no longer just relying on cross-chain transportation to 'borrow' in others' ecosystems, but relies on stBTC, a verifiable yield asset form, to form stable financial uses on more chains. The impact on users is also very direct; you are no longer just selecting 'which chain is hot', but managing three layers of risks and three layers of opportunities: where the underlying yield comes from, whether the cross-chain path is credible enough, and whether the DeFi scenarios on the target chain truly have depth and exit efficiency.
Azu gives you a more practical action guide, summed up in one sentence: If you want to benefit from the 'new public chain native BTC interest', don't chase the highest annualized return first; instead, run a small amount of cross-chain with stBTC and establish the landing path, focusing on confirming the receipt and availability, then prioritize those ecosystems that have already integrated stBTC into their core lending/market scenarios, and then decide whether to increase your position based on liquidity and liquidation conditions. If you are using tools like Bitget Wallet, at the very least, you need to understand the cross-chain sending, exchanging, and Gas processing logic of Wormhole assets to avoid losing the yield advantage in the 'friction of bridges'.
