Zest launches native Bitcoin borrowing without wrapping

Zest Protocol, the firm operating Bitcoin’s (BTC) largest DeFi lending market on Stacks, has announced a capped mainnet demo for its Bitcoin Collateral Vault.

The public demo marks the first full public-mainnet deployment of Zest’s native-Bitcoin collateral vault infrastructure, which consists of self-custodial vaults on Bitcoin L1, enforced by the “digital gold’s” own rules and built for Bitcoin Virtual Machine (BitVM) proof verification, as disclosed to Finbold on Wednesday, September 23.

As such, the demo allows users to deposit real Bitcoin into a self-custodial vault on Bitcoin L1 and borrow real USD Coin (USDC) against it, without wrapping or bridging. 

“We’ve spent five years on programmable Bitcoin, first on Stacks and now on Bitcoin itself. Today you can put real BTC in a vault on Bitcoin and borrow against it on mainnet. That’s why Zest Protocol exists: turning Bitcoin from an idle asset into productive capital,” Tycho Onnasch, Founder of Zest Protocol, told Finbold in a press release.

Bitcoin borrowing on Zest

Unlike decentralized finance (DeFi) approaches, under which users need to wrap BTC into a token such as wBTC or bridge it to another chain, Zest Protocol keeps BTC on its native chain and in the user’s own vault.