The Avalanche (AVAX) Bridge, which enables the transfer of ERC20 tokens from Ethereum (ETH) to Avalanche's C-Chain and vice versa, has expanded support for the Bitcoin (BTC) network, unlocking the opportunity for the trillion-dollar asset to join the Avalanche’s decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.

In simple terms, the bridge would provide Bitcoin holders with a way to transfer their BTC holding to the Avalanche public blockchain, which can then be put to work within Avalanche’s DeFi ecosystem.

According to Avalanche, its bridge has become the most popular Ethereum-connected bridge with over USD 6bn in total valued locked (TVL) and has facilitated the transfer of over USD 43bn in assets between Avalanche and Ethereum since its launch in July 2021.

“The Avalanche Bridge has established a seamless, secure, and low-fee rail for users of all sizes to explore Avalanche and the rapidly growing ecosystem of applications on the platform," Nick Mussallem, Head of Product at Ava Labs, the team behind Avalanche, was quoted as saying.

In an attempt to further simplify the user experience, Avalanche has announced its browser extension and mobile wallet.

Dubbed 'Core', the wallet is teased as a free, non-custodial wallet tailor-made for applications on Avalanche, including subnets and the next generation of Web 3 projects.

The wallet is expected to go live in two phases:

Mussallem argued that Core is not just a wallet, but "a curated, Web3 operating system," as well as "the culmination of extensive user and product research to understand how we can facilitate mass-adoption of Web3 systems."

Avalanche's Core wallet is announced after ConsenSys, the firm behind the popular Ethereum and Web 3 wallet MetaMask, announced it raised USD 450m at