Lombard FAQs

What is Lombard?

Lombard, founded in April 2024, is on a mission to grow the digital economy by building the infrastructure and distribution channels that unlocks Bitcoin’s utility, and transforms the largest decentralized asset from a store of value into a productive financial tool.

This is achievable with a security-first liquid bitcoin primitive, LBTC. LBTC is a liquid and yield-bearing representation of BTC, which can move seamlessly across chains and decentralized finance as collateral without compromising security.

LBTC, enables bitcoin holders of all sizes to fully participate in DeFi, offering unprecedented access to staking, yield generation, lending, borrowing, and trading. With LBTC, holders earn Babylon's native staking yield while still maintaining token liquidity, which can further operate in DeFi.

Who is the team behind Lombard?

Lombard’s founding team is composed of DeFi experts from Polychain, Babylon, Argent, Coinbase, and Maple. All of whom bring extensive experience in starting, scaling, and operating companies in the DeFi space.

Lombard is incubated by Polychain Capital. Polychain Capital’s incubation of Lombard provides financial backing and access to its expert teams and resources.

Who backs Lombard?

In July 2024, Lombard closed a $16 million seed funding round led by Polychain Capital, with participation from BabylonChain, Inc., dao5, Franklin Templeton, Foresight Ventures, HTX Ventures, Mirana Ventures, Mantle EcoFund, Nomad Capital, OKX Ventures, and Robot Ventures.

Strategic partnerships and contributions from major exchanges - Bitget, Bybit, OKX, HTX, and more - were established to aggregate net-new liquidity to their businesses.

The round welcomed additional commitments from prominent founders and executives at Allora, Altlayer, Babylon, BeraChain, Euler, Gearbox, Manta, Megaeth, Pendle, Ritual, Scroll, StakeStone, Seven Seas, and Zircuit. For more, read our blog on our seed round.

Why is my BTC safe with Lombard?

Lombard ensures that LBTC is protected through a multi-layered security approach. Built with security by design and hardened through rigorous code audits, proactive bug bounty programs, sanctions screening, and proactive, real-time, 24/7 security monitoring, contributing to the robust security framework essential for LBTC’s success.

Audits & Bug Bounties:

• Together with leading auditors we have implemented a long-term auditing program to cover all current and future code releases. Once the reports are in, they will be shared in full on our Gitbook.

• Together with Immunefi, we will launch a bug bounty program as an additional security layer on top of security by design and audits. The program offers rewards to white hats for finding and reporting any vulnerabilities in the codebase, which Lombard can then securely fix. Immunefi is the leading bug bounty and security services platform for Web3 and brings projects and hackers together to make Web3 more secure.

Lombard prioritizes security through several layers of protection:

• Cubist Hardware-backed MPA Wallets: Our wallets never leave secure hardware (even during signing) and are governed by multiple security policies, including timelocks and multi-party approvals (MPA) which requires multiple parties to sign-off on every transaction, preventing unauthorized and unilateral access.

• Decentralized Validation: The Security Consortium used by Lombard—comprised of industry leaders—validates and notarizes all transactions, ensuring decentralized security.

• Secure Key Management: Keys are managed and stored—even during signing—by CubeSigner, a hardware-backed key management system designed and built by the Cubist team.

What risks are associated with using Lombard?

• Slashing Risk: There is a risk of slashing if the validators misbehave or fail to perform their duties, which can lead to a loss of staked assets (not yet live on Babylon).

• Depeg Risk: The exchange rate between LBTC and correlated BTC assets (i.e. WBTC) is set by the open market. Due to the 7 day unstaking period on Babylon and Lombard, in times of extreme market volatility, LBTC may trade at a premium or discount. However, users can always unstake via the Lombard WebApp at the full redemption rate.

• Technical Risk: As with any blockchain protocol, there are inherent technical risks, including potential smart contract vulnerabilities, network attacks, and unforeseen bugs. We continuously audit our smart contracts and infrastructure, and have real-time threat monitoring and mitigation in place to mitigate these risks and take action before a threat materializes

What is the role of the Security Consortium?

Unique to Lombard is its Security Consortium, composed of independent organizations which validate and sign critical operations. These operations include the staking and unstaking of BTC into Babylon, and the minting, burning, and bridging of LBTC across supported blockchains. For more information, please check the Security Consortium document.

Is Lombard running a points campaign?

We will be providing information on this shortly. Stay tuned for updates!

Further Questions?

Join the Lombard Discord Server to follow the LBTC community. Here you can ask questions, read answers, share feedback with other users, and much more!