Author: Haotian

With the launch of the Buidlpad public sale, there has been a lot of market discussion about Lombard recently. One perspective suggests that Lombard $BARD is to Bitcoin what stablecoin giants like Circle and Tether are to the US dollar, which is quite an apt comparison. How should we understand this positioning?

In simple terms, Lombard aims to become the infrastructure layer for Bitcoin liquidity in the context of the established trend of large-scale asset tokenization globally, essentially seeking to secure the narrative power for the next cycle.

1) Many people are familiar with $LBTC, which is the only BTC protocol accepted by AAVE. It achieved a total value locked (TVL) of $1 billion in just 92 days and introduced over $2 billion in liquidity across more than 12 public chains, capturing 57% of the entire Bitcoin LST market share.

These figures validate one point: Lombard is activating a large amount of dormant BTC assets through LBTC. Returning to the initial framing of the article, LBTC's ambition is not merely to be a Bitcoin LST staking token; rather, its broader goal is to capture the $2.2 trillion BTC market, replicating the monopoly positions of stablecoin giants Circle and Tether through an evolutionary path of "product > platform > infrastructure."

Reflecting on the successful transformation paths of Tether and Circle, they first occupied the market with USDC/USDT, then became the actual issuers and distributors of "on-chain dollars," ultimately integrating into the entire web3 ecosystem's DeFi protocols, CEX, and DApp applications across all payment scenarios.

By analogy, it is clear that Lombard's ambition for LBTC is similar, striving to be the "master gateway" for BTC liquidity.

2) In terms of infrastructure, Lombard has built a full-stack solution of "consortium chain + SDK + DeFi market." At this point, with both a consortium chain and a DeFi protocol market, one can vaguely sense Lombard's "pragmatic" approach in today's pursuit of funding efficiency.

Taking the Lombard Ledger consortium chain as an example, it is jointly validated by 14 top institutions, including OKX, Galaxy, DCG, Wintermute, Antpool, and F2pool. Essentially, it does not pursue absolute technical decentralization but achieves commercial checks and balances through competitive and cooperative relationships among institutions.

This makes sense; exchanges are competitors, market makers need to arbitrage across different platforms, and mining pools represent the BTC infrastructure pivot. Any wrongdoing by one party would harm its core business.

Thus, the Lombard Ledger acts as a "quasi-L2" layer for BTC, differing from traditional layer 2 solutions that seek to inherit the security of the BTC mainnet. It focuses on how to support the full-chain liquidity of Bitcoin from a funding efficiency perspective. Additionally, the Lombard SDK allows any chain, protocol, or wallet to directly embed native BTC deposit and yield functions, effectively "empowering" each chain with Bitcoin Layer 2 capabilities.

I feel that Lombard has found a balance between decentralization and institutional needs through the consortium chain ledger. In today's crypto narrative dominated by Wall Street institutions, there is no need to hide; it is essentially about doing institutional business with institutional thinking.

3) Finally, we must address the inherent shortcomings of the Bitcoin ecosystem's native narrative. For instance, Babylon has a grand and appealing narrative, using cryptographic magic to enable native staking of BTC; Solv Protocol has taken the route of aggregating liquidity, packaging various BTCs as SolvBTC to address the issue of liquidity fragmentation.

Including Lombard's pragmatic commercial approach, if one only focuses on the native crypto scene, it feels somewhat ineffective. After all, if everyone assumes a thriving BTC ecosystem as the basis for pricing and valuation, they will all fall into a passive state.

The essence of the problem is: BTCFi is still in the "playing by itself" stage, lacking genuine external capital injection.

Therefore, Lombard's series of actions seem to aim at breaking out of the confines of pure crypto native narratives. For example, its exit from tokenized options and staking ETFs as institutional products. The goal of these products is clear—allow traditional financial institutions to participate in BTCFi, without needing to understand what DeFi or LST is; perhaps they only need to know that this ETF can provide an 8-10% BTC-denominated yield.

To some extent, the aim is to allow institutional funds to compliantly allocate crypto assets, and then gradually guide them to participate in on-chain activities, eventually connecting the provided product services directly to traditional financial capital pools.

Letting external funds move on their own means we no longer have to wait anxiously for the uncertain future of that native BTC "ecosystem prosperity."

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