Cardano and Pogun enable Bitcoin DeFi access with mirroring technology

There’s roughly $1.6 trillion worth of Bitcoin sitting in wallets doing essentially nothing. Cardano’s development company, Input Output Group (IOG), thinks it has a solution: a platform called Pogun that “mirrors” Bitcoin onto the Cardano blockchain, giving holders access to lending, yield, and stablecoins while they keep custody of their own coins. Charles Hoskinson, Cardano’s founder, publicly outlined the initiative on May 3, 2026. The core pitch is straightforward. Bitcoin holders get DeFi access. Cardano gets the liquidity. And nobody has to hand their keys to a centralized intermediary to make it work. How mirroring actually works Instead of wrapping Bitcoin in a tokenized form, Pogun clones the representation of Bitcoin assets onto Cardano’s chain. The original Bitcoin stays put. The mirrored version on Cardano can interact with DeFi protocols. The key technical ingredient arriving later in the roadmap is BitVM-powered mirroring, which aims to minimize the trust assumptions baked into most cross-chain bridges today. The platform is being built on top of interoperability groundwork Cardano has already laid, including atomic swaps between the two chains. What makes Pogun genu...