The more complex things often turn out to be simpler. For example, the locked-up value of 1.8 billion in BTC protocol Lombard was originally conceived on a napkin.

Why do I particularly have high hopes for Lombard? Reason 1⃣️ Investors come from the five major exchanges: Binance, OKX, Huobi, Bybit, and Bitget, ensuring a presence in the top five exchanges right from the start.

Although the project has a strong concept, it is not new in terms of BTC narrative, as the BTC Layer 2 battle royale just happened last year.

Reason 2⃣️ The key point is the Lombard team.

After watching Lombard's interview, my first impression was that this project could succeed, and I will explain why👇🧵

Most of the team members of @Lombard_Finance come from top financial institutions and leading crypto projects.

🔹Jacob Phillips is the co-founder of Lombard and was an investor at Polychain Capital.

🔹Kev Silk serves as a senior product manager and previously worked at Goldman Sachs and Ankr.

🔹Matthew Marshall is the head of product and was the engineering and product team lead at Argent.

🔹Charlotte Dodds is the earliest non-founder member and is currently in charge of marketing and communications.

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📌Jacob Phillips: From researching Bitcoin to personally changing its structure.

Lombard co-founder @JacobPPhillips, after long-term research on infrastructure like Babylon and EigenLayer, realized that while Bitcoin's structure can remain unchanged, its verification rights and yield rights can be moved on-chain.

"If even just 10% of Bitcoin flows on-chain, the total value locked (TVL) of the entire DeFi will double."

This is not a hypothesis but a conclusion he derived from countless protocol cases during his time as an investor at Polychain.

So after the emergence of Babylon and AVS, he quickly seized the opportunity to launch LBTC. A 1:1 pegged BTC that can enter on-chain staking and re-staking systems.

In less than a year, Lombard's TVL grew from zero to 2 billion USD, becoming the largest validator on Babylon and capturing 42% market share. Meanwhile, the number of retail + institutional users of LBTC also exceeded 50,000.

📌Matthew Marshall: Users should see buttons, not Taproot and AVS.

@th3m477 is Lombard's product director. You can feel the weight of a single phrase in all his product decisions:

"Users should not be educated. If designed well enough, no explanation is needed."

He is not incapable of creating complex interfaces; on the contrary, he previously worked on wallet architecture at Argent, familiar with the security paths of crypto assets and understanding the technical barriers of on-chain interactions.

But he chooses the simplest path to hide the most complex logic—LBTC's one-click withdrawal, one-click staking, Chainlink validation, and wallet auto-authorization prompts, all backed by large-scale backend integration and permission breakdown.

He won't tell you, "We've used innovative modular architectures," but will simply say:

"Users just need to press a button to make their Bitcoin start working."

Under his leadership, Lombard's onboarding process was compressed by 40%, with wallet users growing by over 30,000, making him one of the few product directors who have truly achieved a fusion of engineering thinking and interactive aesthetics.

📌Kev Silk: SDK is a bridge, not a tool.

@KevSilk focuses on SDK. He states very directly:

"Lombard SDK is not just a tool; it is a bridge to the new era of BTC-Fi."

You can understand it as: he is not just giving developers instruction documents but providing them with a truly usable, reusable, and combinable BTC liquidity entry.

After SDK integration, mainstream protocols like Binance, Bybit, Venus, and Curve have linked LBTC's staking capabilities, releasing over 2.5 billion USD in BTC liquidity. Meanwhile, the average integration time for the SDK was reduced from two weeks to less than four days.

📌Charlotte: Replying on Discord is also a way of building.

The marketing head of Lombard @0xcharlotte_ has the most fragmented work in the team: organizing events, gathering feedback, modifying community bots, analyzing where users get stuck in onboarding.

But the changes she made are clear:

Making AMAs into a series that attracts 50,000 participants;

Reducing Discord response time to an average of within 24 hours;

Achieving +30,000 users for X and community growth, all through natural flow!

She says:

"I don't want to present what we do as hype to persuade people. I want people to feel that this is something they can build together."

› ••••••••• ‹

Releasing BTC native DeFi is a difficult road, but someone has to do it. As Kev said:

"We see billions of BTC sitting idle, and no one is willing to fill this gap. So we will do this."

This interesting team is gradually pushing #BTC forward!