This week, Monad, a high-performance EVM-compatible layer-1, announced Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) is bridging Coinbase’s wrapped BTC asset, cbBTC, to Monad’s DeFi ecosystem, allowing developers to create a new set of primitives around BTC-based liquidity.
CCIP leverages Chainlink’s industry-standard decentralized oracle infrastructure, which has enabled over $28 trillion in transaction value, to transfer digital assets with the highest level of cross-chain security. Last year, Coinbase, the leading publicly listed firm for digital assets, selected CCIP as its exclusive secure bridging solution for all wrapped assets including cbBTC, cbETH, cbDOGE, cbLTC, cbADA, and cbXRP, which have an aggregate market cap of approximately $7 billion.
Wrapped BTC tokens like cbBTC are among key Chainlink-powered use cases scaling BTC-driven DeFi (BTCFi), which brings new utility to the world’s oldest and largest cryptocurrency with an underutilized market capitalization of over a trillion dollars.
Monad is designed to bring advanced applications to scale with a throughput of over 10,000 transactions per second, near-zero gas fees, single-slot finality, and 0.5-second block times. Last year, Monad joined the Chainlink Scale program to accelerate its long-term growth and adoption by giving developers enhanced access to Chainlink services including Data Feeds, Data Streams, and CCIP.
Bridging over $5 billion in cbBTC from Base to Monad allows BTC-backed liquidity to flow into Monad’s high-throughput DeFi markets, unlocking BTC-denominated lending and borrowing markets, deeper spot liquidity, and routing around a Bitcoin-backed unit of account, as well as derivatives, vaults, and structured products. Applications such as Curvance and Neverland are already adopting cbBTC markets on Monad.
“Through Chainlink CCIP, Monad developers can now bring Bitcoin-backed liquidity into fast, composable applications while maintaining cross-chain security as the ecosystem scales,” said Monad Foundation co-founder and GM, Keone Hon, in an official announcement.
“The bridged expansion of cbBTC to the Monad ecosystem through Chainlink brings a premier wrapped asset to a high-performance landscape,” added Josh Leavitt, Senior Director of Product Management at Coinbase.
Chainlink Labs’ Chief Business Officer, Johann Eid, said cbBTC’s CCIP-powered expansion to Monad serves as “a strong signal” that Chainlink’s interoperability standard is essential to the multi-chain economy.
“With Coinbase already leveraging Chainlink CCIP as the exclusive bridging infrastructure for its wrapped asset expansion, $5+ billion in cbBTC can move into Monad while maintaining the institutional-grade security required to manage billions in cross-chain flows.”