Anker expands Bitcoin liquid token to AI blockchain Talus

Decentralized blockchain infrastructure provider Anker will introduce Bitcoin (BTC) liquid staking tokens to AI-based blockchain Talus starting May 1.

“Bitcoin is not only the oldest blockchain, but also continues to have the highest liquidity,” Anker wrote. “Unfortunately, this liquidity is typically held in Bitcoin L1. With Ankr's liquid staking service, Bitcoin can be included through various Bitcoin reprocessing protocols. This allows users on the Bitcoin network to access Bitcoin liquidity to other ecosystems to earn additional high rewards.

To engage in Bitcoin Decentralized Finance (DeFi), users first delegate their BTC to an operator via the Re-Staking Protocol, which Anker then uses as collateral to create BTC Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs). In the case of Talus, Bitcoin LSTs can be used to power blockchain smart agents, or AI assistants, and their applications such as “booking travel, making online purchases and managing portfolios.”

Smart agents on Talus are also capable of providing security exploits such as flash credit attacks by attaching multilayer atomic swaps and executing them in a single transaction. Talus said, “Anker's BTC liquidity pool unlocks a large amount of liquidity to enable smart agents on Talus to simultaneously execute DeFi transactions such as atomic swaps.

The move comes after Anker announced its first bitcoin liquid storage product in early March in partnership with Babylon Protocol. The project promises users to pledge their Bitcoin to Mint LSTs to “securely produce idle Bitcoin”.

Earnings from held LSTs are returned to users' locked bitcoins. Currently, the Babylon protocol is in the testnet phase, with a mainnet launch scheduled for later this year.

Despite the ongoing market correction, the Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem has been growing over the past year with the creation of new protocols such as Ordinal, Inscript, Atomic and Runes.

One of these projects, the omnichain product-generating protocol SolvBTC, has accumulated a total value of $700 million locked from the profit-bearing bitcoins produced on the Arbitrum, Merlin and BNB Smart Chain. In a statement to Cointelegraph, SolvBTC said the protocol recently surpassed 10,000 BTC shares and attracted “over 92,000 participants” since its launch earlier this month.

Related: With memecoins, new protocols revitalize the Bitcoin ecosystem