According to PANews, as the Bitcoin ecosystem continues to expand, participants are seeking ways to generate additional income on top of their holdings. Babylon aims to achieve this by becoming an EigenLayer for Bitcoin. With the recent launch of Bitcoin ETFs and a large influx of funds, institutions have purchased over 2% of the BTC supply, making the Bitcoin ecosystem one of the hottest topics in the market.
Ankr enters the field as a major BTC liquidity staking project, providing holders with liquid funds while still earning staking rewards. Ankr, with a current Total Value Locked (TVL) of $100 million, was the first protocol to launch ETH liquidity staking in December 2020. They offer the most reliable Remote Procedure Call (RPC) and have over six years of experience in the industry, leading in the RaaS (Rollup as a Service) domain.
Ankr recently announced an exclusive partnership with Babylon. Ankr will provide BTC Liquidity Staking Tokens (LST) for the chains protected by Babylon and issue them on-chain, providing additional liquidity and security for the chains. Babylon, the EigenLayer for Bitcoin, currently has a TVL of $6.4 billion, which is a small fraction of Bitcoin's market value. This implies that more idle capital will take advantage of the opportunity to stake and generate income in Babylon.
As mentioned earlier, Ankr is the first LST for BTC in the market, similar to Kelp DAO, ether.fi, and Puffer Finance for ETH. Ether.fi recently launched their token, with a current Fully Diluted Valuation (FDV) of $4.2 billion, while Lido's FDV is $3.2 billion. Ankr's current FDV is only $419 million.
Ankr also leverages the DePIN narrative by providing decentralized computing power and data availability through the network. This further increases the use cases and distribution of the $ANKR token. With a focus on AI, Ankr attended the Nvidia conference and has recently engaged in many discussions around AI. As a Rollup As A Service project, Ankr's attention to artificial intelligence makes it a project and token worth keeping an eye on.