BIFROST

Bifrost, an EVM-compatible parachain on Polkadot, has evolved from a dedicated liquid staking chain into an omnichain LST protocol. In 2023, TVL surged from $43.5M to $110M, driven by new vTokens (vFIL, vASTR) and the launch of SLPx, enabling remote minting of vTokens via XCM V3. In 2024, Bifrost migrated all operations from Kusama to Polkadot, introduced Loop Stake for leveraged staking, and unveiled bbBNC tokenomics, allocating 100% of protocol profits to BNC buybacks with 90% distributed to bbBNC holders. The year also saw TVL exceed $100M again. In December 2024, a farming vulnerability was exploited, resulting in approximately $720,000 in stolen assets. The team responded by pausing farming, implementing three defense layers, state migration, and broader security improvements. In 2025, vETH 3.0 launched, enabling native ETH LST minting on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism. Protocol revenue reached $8.07M with $1.2M gross profit, and vDOT supply grew 157% to 18M. Upbit listed BFC for KRW and USDT trading, enhancing market accessibility. These milestones—SLPx, the Kusama-to-Polkadot migration, bbBNC, the post-incident security overhaul, and vETH 3.0—represent long-term structural progress.

Price action and narrative: BFC spiked 258% in a single September session on about $59 million of 24-hour volume against a $52.9 million market value, then fell back to roughly $0.038; the move was driven by a similarly named tokenized equity on BNB Chain tied to a BNB treasury company rather than by the protocol itself.

Token structure: There is no ongoing buyback or burn mechanism, though 40.79% of supply historically sits in a burn address; about 1.39 billion of 2.37 billion issued tokens circulate, and the BtcUSD stablecoin has only a few hundred holders, leaving on-chain liquidity and real usage thin.

BIFROST is a Substrate and EVM compatible layer one built by Korea's PiLab Technology with chain ID 3068, token BFC, positioned as multi-chain middleware and BTCFi infrastructure that mints BtcUSD against BTC collateral. The most consequential external change in 2026 came from exchanges: on 10 September Upbit added Korean won and USDT markets for BFC, previously available only against BTC, with reference prices of 15.96 won and 0.1788 USDT, putting the asset into mainstream Korean trading for the first time and shifting its liquidity profile.

Onchain and supply structure explain the project: about 80.11 million cumulative transactions, 20 active validators and roughly 27 percent of BFC staked; 40.79 percent of total supply sits in the burn address, yet the top ten addresses hold 98.61 percent of remaining supply and nine active wallets control 97.65 percent, with third-party estimates putting real onchain liquidity near USD 14,800. The Bifrost 2.0 upgrade remained listed as upcoming in October 2026 with no date.

Strategy: keep building middleware for cross-chain assets and BTC-backed stablecoins, running three revenue lines from BtcUSD minting and lending spreads, gas fees and staking inflation, and use the Upbit listing to widen reach in the won market. Risks are concentrated: nearly all supply sits with a handful of addresses and thin liquidity lets very few participants set the price, while persistent confusion with the Polkadot parachain of the same name and its BNC token routinely mixes the two data sets.

Dohyun Pak — Co-founder & CEO; PhD in financial engineering from the University of Michigan; former head of quant at Korea Investment & Securities; associate professor at Gachon University.

JongHyup Lee — Co-founder & CTO; PhD in computer science from Yonsei University; former postdoc at CMU CyLab; co-founder of the PPP hacking team.

Changhyun Yoo — Co-founder & COO; studied computer science at KAIST; built trading platforms for major financial institutions for over a decade.