Blockchain platform Avalanche revealed native support for Bitcoin via the Avalanche bridge. The team published a blog post that says with the new Bitcoin bridging possibility, the network aims to uncover more than half a trillion dollars of value on the BTC network within the Avalanche DeFi ecosystem and expand its set of offerings. Bitcoin holders will be able to directly access earning and yield services across DeFi protocols.
Related: Circle's USDC Stablecoin Now Also Operates on Avalanche
The Avalanche Bridge enables transfers of ERC20 assets between Ethereum and Avalanche. As the blog post said, it has boosted the fast growth of the Avalanche DeFi ecosystem, performing over $50 bln of transfers.
Avalanche is the fourth largest blockchain protocol by total volume. According to DeFiLlama, currently this metric stands at over $2 billion. At the moment of writing, Avalanche's native coin AVAX trades at around $17. It's the 17th largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of over $4 billion.