Cosmos DAO Osmosis to Adopt Fee-Free Bitcoin Bridge

• The revenue-sharing agreement may address the shortcomings of blockchain bridges, in which the parties need to earn revenue directly from deposits and withdrawals.

• The goal is to remove some of the friction users may previously have experienced when bridging their bitcoin holdings to other ecosystems for decentralized finance-related activities.

Decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) Osmosis voted to adopt a fee-free Bitcoin bridge to allow bitcoin (BTC) to move into the Cosmos ecosystem.

Key to the process is a revenue-sharing agreement with Bitcoin bridge Nomic, according to an emailed announcement shared with CoinDesk on Friday. A bridge is a way of improving interoperability of blockchains by allowing users to move crypto assets from one system to another.

The revenue-sharing deal may address the one of shortcomings of bridges: how the different parties earn revenue from deposits and withdrawals. The proposed agreement will align Nomic’s protocol revenue with usage of its bridged BTC, the announcement said.

The goal is to remove some of the friction users may previously have experienced when bridging their bitcoin holdings to other ecosystems for decentralized finance-related (DeFi) activities.

With less than 24 hours remaining until voting concluded, 95% of votes from the Osmosis DAO community were in favor of the deal.

Nomic’s bridge is part of a trend of developers seeking to leverage the value tied up in BTC, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, to bring liquidity to the broader digital asset industry. In April, Nomic announced plans to integrate Babylon’s Bitcoin staking protocol and introduce stBTC, a bitcoin liquid staking token.