Dear Investors,
Following Token Singapore and Messari Mainnet, I wanted to share several promising updates and positive signals for our future.
Institutional Adoption Thesis
Institutional Bitcoin liquidity will outperform retail liquidity in the coming years. The recent approval of Bitcoin spot ETFs and their record inflows indicate that Wall Street now embraces BTC. It’s broadly recognized as an investable asset, and upcoming elections are expected to bring favorable crypto regulations.
iBTC aligns well with this trend. Franklin Templeton and Matrixport have specified that institutions cannot use bridges and require daily redemptions, excluding options like Babylon with its 7-day redemption period. Unlike bridged wrapped Bitcoins or Bitcoin L2s, iBTC uniquely meets these requirements in a self-custodied way, giving us a distinct edge.
Current Challenges
We are in the early stages, having launched a few months ago. Our focus on institutional onboarding means we are playing catch-up in TVL compared to products like FBTC, which prioritize incentives over security.
Despite this, we are confident in our approach. We’ve grown TVL organically to $3M and are negotiating a number of liquidity provision deals ranging from $1M to $30M each. The decentralized model requires more upfront work, but it will yield higher TVL through multiple institutions compared to our competitors' reliance on a single custodian.
We did encounter a setback—Base offered to buy $15M of iBTC to pair with cbBTC, but Coinbase Legal blocked the deal, requiring iBTC to be an "Approved asset." Though the deal didn’t proceed, being considered at this level is still a strong positive.
Breakthrough on Custodians
The major barrier to onboarding has been that most institutions required support from three major custodians: BitGo, Fireblocks, and Copper. Historically, this has been one of our largest impediments.
I’m glad to report that BitGo’s product team is now building a self-custody product in Q4 that supports iBTC. This will unblock certain large institutions, such as FalconX.
Even better, last week, Fireblocks' CEO committed to integrating iBTC by early next year. We are now working with Fireblocks’ Head of Research to scope and implement this.
In the meantime, Fordefi has implemented iBTC support, becoming our first MPC custodian for minting. Unisat's support for iBTC further expands our reach into the Asian retail market.
Sales and Business Development
We continue to expand our merchant program, with the goal of onboarding at least 5 institutions in Q4. We are currently onboarding DV Chain, IMC, Hashkey OTC, FalconX, Cumberland, Bitcoin Suisse, Nascent, Tokka Labs, Satstreet, Secure Digital Markets, and DeFi protocols Pell Network and Solv.
We’re currently tracking 50 chains who have requested iBTC. Today, we are live on Arbitrum, Ethereum, Base and Optimism. We are also in active discussions with Solana, BNB, Movement, HashKey Chain and others.
We’re in discussions with Binance Research re: potential $iBTC and $DLC listings. However, we are not yet planning for a token launch. First, we need to increase our TVL, Volume and ecosystem to ensure a successful $DLC launch. In addition to Binance, we are in discussions with OKX, Kraken, Bybit, Coinbase and others.
Marketing and PR
We've launched a new media website to centralize our blog posts, use cases, podcast features, and investor updates. Subscribe to receive the first edition of our weekly newsletter where we'll cover the latest developments in iBTC and BitcoinFi.
We've initiated a pilot points program on Galxe for social engagement and will launch the complete points program next month, along with more integrated co-marketing campaigns with our partners focused on retail incentives.
We're thrilled to welcome Mayank Sachdev as our new Social & Community Manager. Mayank brings valuable experience from Olive Network and Mudrex, and he's passionate about building vibrant communities.
We've released a new documentation website; check it out! We'll continue updating it as iBTC evolves.
Our Discord account was unfortunately hacked. No other systems were affected, and due to our theft-proof design no funds were at risk. Our Discord is back up and running smoothly, come by and say hi.
We've launched a Dune Dashboard, allowing the community to track the growth of iBTC and its usage in the market.
We're currently updating our website to better appeal to retail traders; stay tuned!
Testimonials
A few quotes from our fans:
“You’re a better, faster, cheaper version of wBTC” – Head of Trading at a leading prime brokerage
"We see DLC.Link as a foundational building block in DeFi, with the potential to become a multi-billion-dollar business. " — Nicole Liu, Comma 3 Ventures
"DLC.Link is making Bitcoin more composable & usable in DeFi" – Oliver Birch, Global Head, Chainlink BUILD Program
"You're sovereign Bitcoin for everything else” – Leading Bitcoin Investment Fund
Product
We’ve begun expanding our DLC Attestor network from 7 to 15. We have more inbound interest in running attestors than slots that we can fill, so we’re selecting node operators strategically.
We are continuing to improve our DeFi and points integrations, as this is still a good way to onboard users and TVL, especially from the APAC region. We have launched our first integration with a yield-generating token protocol SpectraYield, more to come.
As staking continues to begin its expansion into the BTC market, iBTC is positioning itself to be a leader in this space. Towards this goal, we are pushing forward on our partnerships with Symbiotic and Mellow.finance, as well as planning out our siBTC token.
To build upon our various systems for DeFi yield generation, we’re beginning design for our 1-click-yield Bitcoin product. This would allow users to lock or stake bitcoin directly from their bitcoin wallet, and earn interest in various ways in the DeFi ecosystem, without ever needing to do anything on the EVM side!
For this, we’re looking for retail-facing partners who want to provide their users with bitcoin yield opportunities. We’re very excited about this one, look for updates soon!
Finance and Fundraising
We are actively preparing to raise a seed round of $5 million USD, with the potential to oversubscribe.
We’ve closed investment from Round13 Digital, Monday Capital (former head of Rootstock Ventures), Paul Taylor (BlackRock), Dane Cook (4am.Marketing) and Mayur Gupta (CMO of Kraken).
I’m speaking to several funds who can co-lead. Some of the funds doing due diligence are: Franklin Templeton, CMT, Lightspeed Faction, BitGo Ventures, Maelstrom, ParaFi, XBTO, lzCatalyst, Amber Group, SamsungNext, Hashkey, Auros, Chorus One Ventures, M11 Ventures, Fasanara, Phaedrus, DCP and Fulgur Ventures. Also strategic interest from IMC and Ripple.
I feel confident that we’ll be able to close our round this Q4.
How You Can Help
We’re looking to meet more institutions that hold BTC and are looking for safe yields. These may include Asset Managers, Proprietary trading desks, OTC desks, market makers and other financial institutions.
Best,
Aki
PS – Missed any of our previous Investor Updates? Read past editions here
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