tBTC Launches on Starknet, Bringing Bitcoin to the World of Zero-Knowledge Rollups

Bitcoin holders can now trade, borrow, and execute complex DeFi strategies for just $0.01 per transaction

Texas, United States, June 11th, 2025, Chainwire

Bitcoin holders can now trade, borrow, and execute complex DeFi strategies for just $0.01 per transaction with the launch of tBTC on Starknet by Threshold Network. This trust-minimized protocol is transforming Bitcoin into functional DeFi capital while preserving full user custody.

tBTC is now available for direct minting on Starknet via the Threshold UI, allowing users to seamlessly bring native BTC onchain without needing to go through custodians or other intermediaries.

At an average transaction fee of $1.49 on Bitcoin Mainnet (7-day moving average, June 2025), Starknet offers an extreme competitive advantage with its ultra-low transaction costs—as low as $0.01 for the same Bitcoin to be used for trading, lending, or even deploying in complex DeFi strategies, all at minimal cost.

“BTC on Bitcoin Mainnet is like gold bars in a vault: valuable but unusable. At $0.01 per transaction on Starknet, Bitcoin becomes more than a store of value—it can be used to perform small to large-scale trades, executed hundreds of times a day, and as a source of capital to lend or even borrow against. This is Bitcoin as it was meant to be used,” said MacLane Wilkison, Co-Founder of Threshold Labs.

The Numbers: Why Bitcoin DeFi Struggles

Current Bitcoin mainnet reality (June 2025 data):

* Transaction fees: $1.49 (7-day moving average)

* Block time: 10 minutes

* Minimum viable trading capital: $100 (to cover transaction and protocol fees)

* Average DeFi protocol TVL: $1 billion

* Typical trading frequency: 1-2 times per day

* Example DeFi strategy: Borrow on A, trade on B, repay on C

With $547 million in TVL, 193 active protocols, and over 11,000 daily users, Starknet has rapidly emerged as a hub for scalable, composable DeFi. Starknet users can now seamlessly mint tBTC—a fully backed, 1:1 representation of native Bitcoin—through the Threshold UI, enjoying direct access to Bitcoin’s value without needing to go through any intermediaries or losing custody of their BTC.

Alternatively, users can bridge existing tBTC from Ethereum L1 to Starknet using the official StarkGate bridge, offering even more flexibility for Bitcoin holders to participate in Starknet DeFi.

Additionally, tBTC is currently integrating with Starknet’s most prominent protocols to bring trust-minimized Bitcoin liquidity to trading, borrowing, and other use cases.

Uncovering New Application Use Cases:

* High-frequency trading: Execute dozens of small trades per day across DEXs like StarkWare’s own snapshot snapshotchainOptimismOptimism

* Flash lending arbitrage: Efficiently move between lending protocols for optimal rates

* Liquidty mining on multiple protocols simultaneously

* Provide liquidity to yield aggregators likeYield Aggregators

* Seeding new protocols with BTC capital

* BTC-denominated stablecoins or synthetic assets

This integration marks a significant step in expanding the possibilities of Bitcoin within the Web3 ecosystem.

"This fundamentally changes Bitcoin's role in DeFi," said Damian Chen, Head of Growth at the Starknet Foundation. "We're seeing developers revisit ideas that were killed by high fees. Bitcoin at scale is finally possible on Starknet."

A New Era of Scalable and Trust-Minimized Bitcoin Financial Products

Unlike other wrapped Bitcoins that require a central corporate custodian to hold the Bitcoin, tBTC uses threshold cryptography, distributing the secret keys required to control the Bitcoin among multiple independent nodes that cooperate to generate signatures. These nodes are secured by open-source code and community oversight, ensuring that no single entity can steal the Bitcoin or act maliciously. No KYC is required, and users retain full control over their Bitcoin private keys throughout the process.

While Starknet provides the scaling through its zero-knowledge proofs, which enable thousands of transactions to be compressed into one proof, achieving 857 TPS in testing while inheriting the same security guarantees of the Ethereum Mainnet, Threshold provides the trust minimization. STARK cryptography allows Starknet to batch together and compress up to 8,192 transactions into a single proof, achieving high throughput without sacrificing security.

How to Access tBTC on Starknet

There are two ways to access tBTC on Starknet:

1. Mint tBTC directly on Starknet: Visit the Threshold UI to mint tBTC on Starknet using the preferred method.

2. Bridge tBTC from Ethereum L1: Transfer existing tBTC from Ethereum L1 to Starknet using the official StarkGate bridge.

About Threshold Network

Threshold Network powers tBTC, the leading decentralized 1:1 Bitcoin-backed asset for DeFi. Secured by a 51