TL;DR
- Wormhole added Stacks to its multichain infrastructure, enabling native transfers of sBTC and STX to Solana and Sui.
- The integration aims to revive Stacks’ liquidity, with its TVL dropping from $400M to $161.5M, by facilitating its use in high-volume DeFi ecosystems.
- The NTT protocol allows Bitcoin to enter the DeFi ecosystem without compromising its security, targeting the activation of part of its $2 trillion market cap.
Wormhole, one of the most prominent blockchain interoperability protocols in the market, announced the integration of Stacks, a Bitcoin Layer 2 network, into its multichain infrastructure.
This integration will enable sBTC and STX tokens to move natively to other blockchains such as Solana and Sui, without relying on wrapped versions or intermediaries. The operation will use the Native Token Transfers (NTT) standard, a mechanism that eliminates liquidity fragmentation and maintains a unified, controlled supply of assets across all compatible networks.
Stacks launched sBTC in December 2024 to enable Bitcoin usage in smart contracts and DeFi applications. Since then, demand for programmable liquidity has grown steadily. However, its TVL has dropped by more than half since April 2024, falling from $400 million to $161.5 million today. The integration with Wormhole could help recover part of that liquidity by allowing its assets to interact directly with other high-volume DeFi networks.
Wormhole Targets Bitcoin’s Dormant Capital
The NTT protocol allows assets to be issued and transferred while preserving their native properties. This means sBTC and STX can be used in decentralized financial applications across multiple blockchains without losing their direct connection to Bitcoin’s security model. Stacks will retain full control over the behavior of its tokens on each network, managing their supply, contracts, and upgrades.
This move seeks to tap into Bitcoin’s massive $2 trillion market cap, which remains largely outside the scope of decentralized finance. Firms like Pantera Capital have projected that the value locked in Bitcoin-based DeFi solutions could reach up to $450 billion. Stacks’ arrival on Wormhole will unlock part of that capital through a programmable, decentralized framework without sacrificing Bitcoin’s security standards.
Stacks now joins other projects operating under the NTT standard, such as Lido’s wstETH and Sky’s USDS. The goal is to open new liquidity and yield options for Bitcoin within the global DeFi market, while maintaining the security and decentralization principles demanded by the community.
