Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Badger DAO is taking more steps in bringing Bitcoin to Ethereum with its latest partnership with institutional onramp Fireblocks.
In an April 9 announcement, Badger DAO stated that the partnership would help to bring institutional Bitcoin to the DeFi ecosystem. The Bitcoin wrapping protocol also aims to increase its usage among the growing institutional investor base.
Fireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform offering secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets for institutional clients.
“We’re excited to announce a strategic partnership between Fireblocks and BadgerDAO to enable Fireblocks 200+ institutional clients to securely hold Badger assets on their platform and put their Bitcoin to work,”
Bringing Bitcoin to DeFi
The announcement added that with the right on-ramps, institutional investors could put their recently acquired Bitcoin to work. Because of this. it could help usher in the next big capital injection for DeFi.
Fireblocks has secured the transfer of over $400 billion in digital assets to date. It also completed a $133 million Series C funding round in March led by some big names in venture capital.
The partnership will enable the Badger dApp and Sett vaults to be integrated into Fireblocks to create API and browser extension products.
“This enables their users to deposit tokenized bitcoin directly into any of our automated yield producing vaults to generate between 10–197% APY.”
Badger’s flagship product is the Sett vault. Users can deposit tokenized Bitcoin in the vault, such as wBTC or renBTC, to generate an automated yield.
The protocol claims to have over $1 billion worth of tokenized Bitcoin in its vaults from automated yield aggregation strategies. The collaboration will also enable Institutional clients to securely hold their Badger tokens and interest-bearing assets on the Fireblocks platform.
Staking on the protocol in return for high-yielding LP tokens is also available for Fireblocks users, it added.
Fireblocks first onboarded institutional clients to DeFi through integration with lending protocol Compound Finance in March 2020. It’s partnered with several other crypto and DeFi protocols since including Aave, Synthetix, and NEM.
As reported by BeInCrypto, BadgerDAO partnered with Yearn Finance in February to develop secure Bitcoin vaults. It also launched its own stablecoin called CLAWS in the same month.
BADGER Price Update
BadgerDAO’s native token climbed 8% on the news, reaching $41.82 at the time of press according to CoinGecko. BADGER has retreated 10% over the past week, however, but much of those gains have been clawed back.
The token hit an all-time high of $84 on Feb. 9 but has currently retreated to about half that. TVL on the protocol is around $1 billion according to DeFi Pulse.