Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC)

One amazing project that has been the focus of the deFi community lately is the Wrapped Bitcoin. Wrapped Bitcoin, or WBTC, has been the most successful project in the deFi category in terms of market capitalization, use in the sector, and community growth. The purpose behind Wrapped Bitcoin is very intriguing. It is a protocol that aims to bring the whole Bitcoin infrastructure under the covers of Ethereum. This means that users will be able to use Bitcoin while staying inside Ethereum’s ecosystem.

WBTCs, as actual products are tokens based on ERC-20 standards. Each token is basically supported by a Bitcoin in a 1:1 parity. WBTC is a way to integrate Bitcoin, and therefore other cryptocurrencies, to their DeFi counterparts on the Ethereum blockchain. Before WBTC, there was no way for Bitcoin holders to participate in the DeFi space, as it only supports ERC-20 tokens. How things happened before was that users had to exchange their Bitcoin for Ethereum or any other ERC-20 token, and it required transferring their coins to and fro cryptocurrency trading exchanges and wallets. Altogether, it used to be an arduous task, and the users then were not owning Bitcoin, they were holding Ethereum. WBTC has made this process easier and much quicker. The legging into Ethereum from Bitcoin does not require these many steps and can be considered direct for an end-user.

WBTC is a collaborative project of BitGo, Compound, MakerDAO, Kyber, and Ren.

It is being developed under the unanimous and collaborative efforts of many cryptocurrency organizations.

The current development activities are being done collectively under the collaboration of many cryptocurrency giants. The code for the WBTC protocol is available for the public on GitHub. The GitHub repository is very active and shows frequent commits.

The development around WBTC has been very promising and it has gained an unmatched amount of support in only two years. With the way things are going, WBTC is going to grow both in terms of its community and digital usage.

The upcoming projects under the hood of WBTC are Betoken. Betoken is a project that will increase the use of cases for WBTC and grow its involvement in daily transactions. Other than that, another much-hyped project is known as dYdX and is a tool that will allow users to lend, borrow, and margin Bitcoin on the Ethereum network.

WBTC has immense potential. This can be gauged by the fact that the most popular cryptocurrency is Bitcoin. Even if we talk in terms of market capitalization, BTC has a clear lead. On the other hand, deFi is the future of the cryptocurrency world. When both these forces will join, the result will naturally become one of the most sought after utility.

The project is very young now. It was launched in January 2019 as a collaborative effort between multiple big players of the community. It is interesting to note that the majority of these organizations belonged to deFi space and were aiming to use Bitcoin to increase liquidity on the Ethereum network. BitGo, Compound, MakerDAO, Kyber, and Ren are some of the blockchain entities supporting the development of WBTC. The reason to target Bitcoin is that Bitcoin is by far the most popular cryptocurrency of all time, and a majority of it is just sitting idly in cold wallet storage. By bringing a fraction of that idle cryptocurrency into the natural market will boost the deFi economy and will prove to be fruitful in terms of better liquidity. Wrapped Bitcoin has gained quite a name for itself. It has become a rising force in the deFi space. Crypto-enthusiast who were particularly interested in Bitcoin is now pulled towards the world of deFi all because of WBTC. In October, Coinbase announced that it is going to list WBTC on its exchange, Coinbase Pro. This is a very exciting development for WBTC, as it is now being accepted and listed by many renowned trading exchanges.

WBTC has attracted a great number of followers in no time and has developed a huge community around itself. It has active representation on social platforms like Reddit, Medium, Twitter, etc. It is being adopted by a growing number of exchanges and is on its way to becoming a mainstream cryptocurrency.

Wrapped Bitcoin has swept the cryptocurrency markets with great success and has acquired amazing partnerships along the way. First of all, it is being developed under the collaboration of many cryptocurrency giants like BitGo, Compound, MakerDAO, Kyber, and Ren. Many cryptocurrency trading exchanges have also listed WBTC on their exchange lists in the previous year. Among these are Coinbase Pro, Binance, Bittrex, OKEx, etc. In September, WBTC entered into a partnership with TRON cryptocurrency as well. BitGo, one of the developers of WBTC, plans to launch the token on the TRON blockchain as well. This will take WBTC to new heights as it will capture another cryptocurrency network other than Ethereum.

Wrapped Bitcoin is very similar to many other cryptocurrencies in its architectural styles. Although many of the other wrapped technologies do not necessarily target Bitcoin, the architectural concept is very close to the likes of Yearn Finance (YFI), Wrapped Ether (WETH), Tether (USDT), USD Coin (USDC), Dai (DAI), ChainLink (LINK) and Compound (COMP), etc.