At the Polkadot Asia developer conference Sub0, leading decentralized liquid staking protocol Bifrost announced the launch of LoopStake, a new Leverage Staking product. The cutting-edge product, which will be available on bifrost.app starting on March 13, is intended to provide consumers a one-click, easier method to increase the return on their staked assets.
Through a process known as looping, users of leverage staking stake assets to earn an LST. They then use the same liquid staking token (LST) as collateral on a lending protocol to borrow the staked assets and earn the LST once again with the borrowed asset. Loopstake democratizes and adds a new dimension to crypto asset management by enabling users to access this approach with just one click and avoiding the very inefficient and gas-intensive procedure of manually looping collateral.
Bifrost, which has over $150 million in Total Value Locked (TVL) and is powered by Polkadot, is now the biggest liquid staking protocol on Polkadot. It is built on the reliable Substrate architecture. Leverage staking for assets like DOT will be supported by the new product initially, with plans to progressively extend to other assets, including cross-chain.
In order to promote liquid staking adoption and serve a diverse user base, including both seasoned DeFi investors and those who are just beginning to investigate prospects in the market, Loopstake takes advantage of Bifrost’s specialized liquid staking architecture and Polkadot’s trustless interoperability. It was developed to simplify leverage staking, which may be a challenging procedure for non-native DeFi users. For those who are eager to engage in the yield strategy, it provides a simple and straightforward alternative.
Lurpis Wang, Cofounder and CEO of Bifrost stated:
“With the launch of LoopStake by Bifrost, we are opening a new chapter in crypto asset management and providing investors with unprecedented value-added opportunities. This innovative solution aims to give users greater flexibility and higher potential returns through a lending curve customized for liquid staking tokens, marking our commitment to continuous exploration and innovation in decentralized finance.”
While vKSM, Bifrost’s liquid staked token for KSM, is very close to the 500,000 KSM ($25M) TVL milestone and is dominating the Kusama ecosystem, vDOT, its liquid staked token for DOT, recently exceeded 7,000,000 DOT ($68M) in TVL.
A notable change in the DeFi ecosystem has been the growth of liquid staking after Ethereum’s Shapella upgrade, which allowed ETH withdrawals from staking contracts. With almost $50 billion in TVL, liquid staking is now the biggest category in the industry. Adoption of LSTs is skyrocketing as a result of their inherent “risk-free” yield and adaptability, which have led to them replacing native network assets as the preferred collateral inside many DeFi protocols. According to some, LSTs are similar to fixed-income instruments seen in TradFi, including US treasuries.
