Jacob Phillips

CoFounder @Lombard_Finance prev: Polychain, Perennial

[Jacob Phillips @JacobPPhillips]

I think this is a new DeFi First?
$500mn+ asset acquisition

Here's the gist of it:

BTC onchain is broken.

Users want the real thing — not branded wrappers, high mint/redeem fees, and gated access.

At best, your current BTC wrapper is a 3rd or 4th priority for the team operating it. Users, Developers, and Bitcoin deserve better.

Lombard + BTC.b will make BTC in DeFi better than BTC on CEXs. You'll be using Bitcoin onchain & you won't even know it.

The Gameplan:
- Direct integration to apps (Branded as "BTC")
- Permissionless (and free) mint/redeem
- Full suite of developer tools to craft the perfect UX
- Accessible to all major ecosystems with unified liquidity
- Institutional-grade security (backed by OKX, Kraken, DCG, Galaxy, etc...)

Partnering with Avalanche was the perfect launchpad for this shared vision.

BTC.b:
- $500mn+ TVL (with no incentives)
- Trusted by @aave @GMX_IO and all other major apps on AVAX
- Led by a team leading the charge in institutional crypto

BTC.b will become the foundation of our proliferation of BTC onchain.  A credibly neutral, multichain Bitcoin primitive — built to look, feel, and act exactly like the underlying BTC, but with enhanced access & capabilities.

BTC will come onchain & never go back.

Coming to @ethereum @solana @HyperliquidX @megaeth @monad and many more very soon.

[The Block @TheBlockCo]

EXCLUSIVE: Lombard Finance acquires BTC.b, Avalanche's bridged bitcoin asset, from Ava Labs https://t.co/6N71Ch79c1

[Jacob Phillips @JacobPPhillips]

@AdriansCryptoo Doesn’t have to be maxi. Just someone betting on btc price growth over long-term.

[Jacob Phillips @JacobPPhillips]

STRC isn’t great as a USD yield product right now —> exposed to some Bitcoin risks, without Bitcoin upside.

STRC as a Bitcoin yield product however…. 👀

[Jacob Phillips @JacobPPhillips]

10bps of America is at this sporting event today in the middle of Indiana.

[Jacob Phillips @JacobPPhillips]

There's virtually no white space left for differentiation... so it's a gladiator arena

[Jacob Phillips @JacobPPhillips]

I wouldn't wish competing in the DeFi perps space upon my worst enemy.

You compete directly for trader attention with:
-> CEXs
-> Perp DEXs
-> Memecoins & Prediction markets
-> A sea of startups all trying to incrementally improve your product

[jez (equity perps era) @izebel_eth]

thanks for everything eth, even if i dont own u anymore

[Jacob Phillips @JacobPPhillips]

@defiprime 100%

[Jacob Phillips @JacobPPhillips]

People don't appreciate how far DeFi composability has come.

Yield-bearing tokens ("Superfluid collateral") have always been the way.

First: stETH, eETH, sUSDe, LBTC

Now:
- Vault tokens
- Unsec. lending
- off-chain funds
- RWAs

Collateral proliferation on its way.

[Tom Wan @tomwanhh]

Worth flagging: Wintermute Select Vault on Morpho has whitelisted a Wildcat token representing uncollateralised USDC lent to Wintermute.

The morpho market prices via exchange rate, so in a very unlikey event that Wintermute default on Wildcat would propagate to this vault.

Wintermute is a top-tier player and probably the most reputable counterparty available for this kind of structure. But once an uncollateralised credit position becomes composable collateral, downstream depositors should have visibility.

A PoR for the loan position (similar to Ethena's reserve transparency model) would be a meaningful upgrade for the industry as these structures grow.

[Jacob Phillips @JacobPPhillips]

Tokens distracted investors from the easiest Beta plays on growth of crypto broadly.

The (relatively) slow grind of @circle, Custodians, crypto asset managers, etc. becoming $billion businesses over many years feels so obvious in retrospect.

Beautifully simple businesses.

[rob @rwitoff]

Yesterday @coinbase experienced a multi-hour service disruption affecting trading, exchange access, and balance updates. Here's our initial read from Coinbase engineering on what happened, how we recovered, and what we're addressing.

At approximately 23:50 UTC on 2026-05-07, our monitoring detected cascading quote failures from internal services that triggered multiple Sev1 incidents that engineering immediately began investigating. Customer-facing impacts included spot trading, Prime, International and derivative exchanges.

Root cause: a thermal event (cooling system failure) inside a subset of racks within a single building in AWS us-east-1. We run a primary replica of our exchange infrastructure in a single zone, consistent with industry standards to reduce latency. To prepare for failures like this, we maintain a distributed standby, but during this incident, failures in the primary zone that were designed to be isolated were not, extending the duration of our outage.

The failure cascaded down two paths:
1. Multiple hardware components beneath our exchange’s matching engine failed, requiring recovery and failover
2. Distributed Kafka clusters that manage messaging across Coinbase systems failed to remain available, also requiring partition failovers to new hardware brokers with many TiBs of data

After isolating the incident: automated tooling drained ~10 Kubernetes clusters worth of related workloads out of the affected zone to stabilize internal services. Most services were back to normal within ~30 minutes of diagnosis. The two things we couldn't automatically drain: the exchange (dedicated hardware and storage) and Kafka (managed service that was designed to be resilient to this, with unique problems).

The exchange matching engine is the core system responsible for processing orders and maintaining order books. It is a distributed cluster and requires quorum to safely elect a leader and continue processing trading activity. During the incident, infrastructure-level constraints in the affected datacenter left only a subset of nodes healthy, preventing the cluster from reaching quorum. As a result, trading across Retail, Advanced, and Institutional exchanges were blocked.

Recovery required our oncall and engineering teams to execute our disaster recovery plan, restore quorum safely, and validate system health under constrained infrastructure conditions. The team built, tested, deployed, and validated the fix while continuing to manage the broader incident.

Kafka recovery was a much larger scale operation. Our primary managed Kafka partitions process many terabytes of data daily and are designed with resiliency guarantees for uninterrupted operation during a datacenter failure just like this. In this case, those guarantees failed and required manual recovery.

We again relied on disaster recovery procedures to recover stuck partitions onto new hardware (brokers) that enabled us to safely bring x-service messaging back online across Coinbase. During the lag, customers saw delayed balance streams which resolved automatically once replication caught up. No data lost.

Once the engine came back up as part of our standard runbooks, we re-opened markets carefully: all products to cancel-only mode first, audited product states, then moved all markets to auction mode, before restoring trading on Coinbase Exchange.

What went right: the team. Incident response across the company came together within minutes, followed well-rehearsed playbooks and used secure automation tooling to recover all services. We have a strong, senior team at Coinbase that worked through rare failure modes to recover all services.

To our customers: losing access to your account, even temporarily, is unacceptable. We know that. We're sorry, and we’ll publish a full root cause analysis in the coming weeks 🙏

[Jacob Phillips @JacobPPhillips]

BTC-backed borrowing is coming onchain — it feels so obvious.

Offchain: 10% + custodial
Onchain: 5% (50% off!) + noncustodial

In time, Strike, exchanges, mining pools will all be leaders in helping BTC holders make the transition.

Only a matter of time.

[Jacob Phillips @JacobPPhillips]

This "bear market" is a clear inflection point.

Multiple changes in microstructure occurring simultaneously:

1. Crypto natives--> Institutions
2. B2C --> B2B (crypto as a backend for fintechs)
3. "RIA's are the new retail" (dark horse)

[Jacob Phillips @JacobPPhillips]

Always follow @Lombard_Finance for official updates.

[Jacob Phillips @JacobPPhillips]

Had people reach out to me about @IOHK_Charles livestream.

To clarify: @Lombard_Finance DID NOT have any direct exposure.

This report presented on the livestream is AI-generated and contains incorrect information.

[Jacob Phillips @JacobPPhillips]

What did happen:

Lombard took extra precaution during a period of uncertainty to pause a few unaffected LZ bridging routes.

Related notes:
- Nearly all Lombard bridges operate on CCIP
- Only notable route paused was Solana-Ethereum LZ bridge (less than 5% of TVL)
- Native Mint/redeem on both Ethereum and Solana remained active the entire time.

[Maksym Repa @0xMaksym]

.@sparkdotfi has a feature that automatically resets the max supply cap every 12 hours.

Had this been live on other lending protocols during the Kelp hack, lender exposure would've been significantly limited.

- A $10-50M per-12hr supply cap (calibrated to asset quality and size) introduces massive lender protection with minimal UX impact.

- On Aave specifically, the cap could be hard-set to match half of the ETH inside Umbrella's insurance fund (over $50M of ETH supplied to Umbrella). Then, if the market is frozen within 12hrs of identifying the hack (easy), regular lenders lose nothing.

(Insurance solutions like Umbrella are a MUST as well)

To every lending venue: please do implement a max immediate supply cap. There's no excuse not to.

Lending is the cornerstone of DeFi — and it's never been more vulnerable than today.

I've learned today that this feature has been live on SparkLend for 2 years — kudos to @hexonaut @MonetSupply, and the rest of the team!

[Jacob Phillips @JacobPPhillips]

I, like many others, found it hard to imagine a comeback from a loss of this size.

Out of the darkest of times, this is a VERY strong response.

- Rounded up $150mn
- Outlined Path to relaunching protocol (Not giving up!)
- AND secures a partnership with @tether

[Drift @DriftProtocol]

Today, Drift is announcing a collaboration with @tether and other partners totaling up to nearly $150 million to support our commitment to a relaunch with USDT at the center, and a path to user recovery.

These funds encompass a $100M revenue-linked credit facility, an ecosystem grant, and loans to market makers, designed to fund a dedicated user recovery pool.

Learn more 👇

[Jacob Phillips @JacobPPhillips]

If the tri-party agreement was technology instead of legal docs…

- Control/title of btc remains with user
- 1 of n security
- Built using battletested primitives (user is not the guinea pig)

[Lombard @Lombard_Finance]

We've published the Bitcoin Smart Accounts whitepaper.

A technical specification of the protocol, its architecture and security model.

Here's a quick breakdown of what we've built and why it matters.🧵

[Stani @StaniKulechov]

BTC.b is a native Bitcoin product at custody and available as a collateral directly on Aave.

[Jacob Phillips @JacobPPhillips]

Every Asset Manager is in the process of onboarding clients to BTC.

Could it be more obvious? $Trillions in net-new demand for crypto assets is coming soon.

Began pushing BTC to clients in 2026:
- Schwab
- Morgan Stanley
- BofA / ML
- Vanguard
- Goldman Sachs

[Frank Chaparro @fintechfrank]

Schwab on crypto allocation:

BTC: ~1% to ~6%
ETH: ~0.5% to ~4%

[Jacob Phillips @JacobPPhillips]

“DPRK built the protocols you know and love”

RIP Defi summer.

[Tay 💖 @tayvano_]

oh god uhhhh like sushi, thorchain, yam, pickle, harvest, reclaim, swing, paid, naos, shezmu, qrolli, saffron, sifu, napier, harmony, blueberry, stabble, onering, elemental, divvy, la token, impermax, kira, cook, fantom, ankr, gamerse, metaplay, spice, beanstalk, deltaprime, magiccraft, hector, despace, depo, creamfi, shib, kumainu, starlink, yearn, floki and that’s just off the top of my head