Keep Network, a Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocol, has partnered with Bison Trails for non-custodial services.

The DeFi project is particularly interesting as it facilitates the staking of BTC through an ERC-20 representation dubbed ‘tBTC'. Developed by Thesis, a blockchain venture studio, Keep leverages the underlying smart contracts to run tBTC in a trustless manner.

Currently, Keep’s other staking partners include Boar Network, Figment, and Staked. Though still at its early stages, the keep protocol is set to tap into BTC’s liquidity to improve the existing DeFi ecosystem.

Basically, the staked tBTC is lent out at an interest rate to the benefit of the lender and general market liquidity. Thesis founder and CEO, Matt Luongo, is optimistic that the network will attract at over 75% of the current market share in DeFi.

Keep’s Partnership with Bison Trails

The collaboration with Bison Trails is quite a significant milestone for Keep, given the value proposition. Bison Trails specializes in blockchain as a service (BaaS) and has so far attracted prominent chains including Libra and Polkadot.

With Keep Network now in the picture, Bison Trails will increase its foothold in Ethereum projects whose underlying is a token version of BTC. Viktor Bunin, a specialist at Bison Trails, emphasized on this strategic niche:

“Infrastructure is important because if your node is being asked to sign a message or it’s holding onto BTC as one of the shards, you ideally don’t ever want to be offline.”

Notably, the tBTC network is gradually being rolled out having released v1 on April 27th. According to Luongo, Keep will further launch the ecosystem’s random beacon on May 4th; this is meant to facilitate trustless routing of the staked tBTC digital assets.

The network’s native token, KEEP, will also be rolled out one month from now and is set to support the staking or redemption of tBTC.

Given its prospects, Keep managed to raise around $7.7 million at the beginning of April in a token deal with Collaborative Fund, Fenbushi Capital, and Paradigm capital amongst others. As of press date, the initiative claims to have already partnered with over 40 in a bid to expand operations. Keep is also allegedly in the process of bringing tBTC to MakerDAO’s ecosystem.