Native Bitcoin Collateralized Lending — Babylon has done it! Testnet is now live Bitcoin is the biggest and most trusted crypto asset, but its presence in DeFi has always been pretty weak. Only ~1% of Bitcoin is actually used in DeFi. The rest either sits in cold wallets or gets wrapped into various forms of BTC that aren’t native. Why is this the case? Because in the past, moving Bitcoin into DeFi always came with a cost. You’d either wrap it into wBTC and trust the custodian, use a cross-chain bridge and rely on the security of the bridge’s code and operators, or hand it over to centralized institutions for safekeeping. All three options go against Bitcoin’s core principle: your coins, your control. This conflict is the key pain point of the BTCFi narrative. Whoever can make Bitcoin usable as collateral without giving up custody will solve the biggest bottleneck in the space. That’s exactly what @BabylonLabs_io is doing. They’re an infrastructure company focused on native Bitcoin collateral. Back in 2025, their Bitcoin staking protocol hit a peak total value locked (TVL) of $7.2 billion, becoming the hottest Bitcoin project at the time. Now, they’ve launched Trustless Bitcoin Vaults (TBV), pushing native BTC further into the broader on-chain economy. BABY is the native token of the Babylon network.