SmartCon 2024 featured presentations from more than 100 blockchain industry pioneers and financial leaders, who gathered to highlight the convergence of TradFi and DeFi into a more efficient global financial system. To delve deeper into the most groundbreaking topics from this year’s event, Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino interviewed some of the most influential speakers on-site at Hong Kong’s Kerry Hotel.
Matthew Donovan is Head of Business Development at Lombard, a Bitcoin liquid staking protocol built on Babylon and the largest provider of liquid staking tokens (LSTs) by market share. He sat down with Malandrino to discuss how Lombard is working to unlock Bitcoin’s utility as a dynamic financial tool within the DeFi ecosystem.
In October, Lombard announced its partnership with industry-standard decentralized computing platform Chainlink to promote a secure, scalable, decentralized BTC-based economy. Lombard will integrate Chainlink’s essential tokenization infrastructure, including Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), Proof of Reserve (PoR), and Price Feeds, to support the transparency and cross-chain utility of its flagship LST, LBTC.
Donovan explained Lombard’s goal to create a seamless user experience for retail and institutional investors to gain exposure to BTC, while minting an asset like LBTC that could ultimately function as a DeFi primitive.
“The beauty of what we’re doing within Lombard is we abstract the complexities away from the user – we enable them to click buttons,” he said. “If you can simplify the experience, while also enabling folks to get exposure to the Bitcoin staking protocol, and then also stay liquid and deploy LBTC across extended DeFi strategies, the opportunities are endless.”
He believes that while liquid staking protocols like Lombard have just begun to scratch the surface of BTC’s realm of possibilities within DeFi, the proliferation of BTC ETFs points to a promising future.
“I’m not saying that we’re halfway there or even a quarter of the way there, but we’re on our way,” he said.
An official blog outlines how the partnership between Lombard and Chainlink will create opportunities for users, layer-2 networks, and blue-chip DeFi protocols to build new use cases for LBTC. Beyond growing the percentage of BTC’s market cap that is staked and building out products including its own staking SDK, Lombard is gearing up for a large institutional push.
“We very much believe that LBTC could be integrated in a number of different ways across TradFi strategies,” Donovan said.
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Matthew Donovan.