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    Interlay aims to advance Bitcoin’s DeFi potential with new interoperable bridge

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    Interlay, a newly appointed Polkadot (DOT) parachain network, is nearing the completion of a two-year Bitcoin (BTC) bridge development project on Polkadot, with the launch announcement on its sandbox platform Kusama.

    Additionally, Interlay has integrated a Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC) digital asset, known as kBTC, on their Canary parachain Kintsugi. The asset is already available for trading on other Polkadot parachains Karura, governed by Acala, and Moonriver, governed by Moonbeam.

    It is expected that Interlay will seek to deploy its technology across both Cosmos and Ethereum during the coming year to enhance interoperability between chains.

    Alexei Zamyatin, the co-founder and CEO of Interlay, stated:

    “There is 14 billion USD worth of Bitcoin ‘DeFi’ on Ethereum, controlled by a handful of centralized custodians, behind KYC, with no remedy for users or DApps if something goes wrong. Even big players like Maker, Compound and Aave implicitly trust a few tradiFi institutions.”

    The initial development of this project was financially supported by an undisclosed, up-to-$100,000 Web3 Foundation grant issued in March 2020.

    Related: How Polkadot’s parachain auctions make a decentralized Web3 possible

    Following this, the interoperability project was the subject of two capital raises, both a $3 million seed round in July 2021 and a Series A $6.5 million round in December 2021. At the time of the latter, the founder of CEO of lead contributor DFG Capital, James Wo stated that Interlay’s solution will “expand the cross-chain possibilities for Bitcoin.”

    In February, Interlay was announced among the winners of Polkadot’s tenth parachain auction slot, securing in excess of 2.7 million DOT tokens from nearly 20,000 participants.