A short story involving love and real-estate.
Coinbase Co-Founder Invests In Project To Bridge Bitcoin And Ethereum
The inspiration for tBTC dates back to when Matt Luongo, the founder of Keep Network parent Thesis.co, and his wife found a house they wanted to buy.
“It’s time to sell your Bitcoin,” she said.
“The hell it is,” Luongo replied. “I don’t want to sell.”
“What have we been saving for, if not a house?” she asked.
“Well…” he replied.
He at once started looking for somewhere he could get a Bitcoin collateralized loan so he could buy the house. He found a lender he had been told was crypto friendly. The lender loved crypto. “Sell me your Bitcoin, come back in 30 days, and we’ll pretend we never had this conversation,” said the lender.
But, Luongo wasn’t concerned with privacy or secrecy or whatever the lender was implying. He simply didn’t want to sell his Bitcoin. He’d rather hold and use them as collateral.
Since then, the space has matured, Luongo said, highlighting the novel rate lending products mostly targeting high net worth individuals. The experience of trying to use Bitcoin as collateral to buy a house got him thinking about tBTC, a decentralized redeemable BTC-backed ERC-20 Token. It’s an attempt to bring Bitcoin to Ethereum, enabling the creation of a tBTC asset within the Ethereum ecosystem.
“The goal is to give Bitcoin the superpowers that smart contracts have on Ethereum, and, also, to bring Bitcoin as collateral to decentralized finance,” he explains. tBTC is backed 1:1 by Bitcoin.
“It's trustless and permissionless to mint and redeem; there aren't any intermediaries, and it's simple and secure,” said Luongo. “It maintains the hard money properties of Bitcoin on Ethereum.” tBTC provides a private place to store Bitcoin keys.
Another narrative on the birth of tBTC could be found below.