The total number of wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) on the Ethereum blockchain is now more than 187,610, representing over 1% of Bitcoin’s circulating supply.
For the uninitiated, a wrapped token is a tokenized version of another digital asset. It is pegged to the value of the underlying asset it represents, i.e., 1 BTC is equivalent to 1WBTC. The ingenuity of a wrapped token is that it allows an asset to live on a blockchain that it wasn’t initially issued on. In this case, wrapped Bitcoin is being hosted on the Ethereum blockchain.
WBTC was one of the first projects to issue an ERC-20 token that is pegged to Bitcoin on a 1:1 ratio. It was launched in January 2019 as a partnership between BitGo, Kyber, and Ren.
Data on Etherscan reveals that there are now over 187,000 WBTC tokens on Ethereum, valued at over $6.5 billion at current market prices. With Bitcoin’s current circulating supply of 18,731,306, about 1% of the flagship crypto has been wrapped on Ethereum.
One why investors may be converting their Bitcoin to WBTC, doing so allows the asset to function as an ERC-20 token that can be used across several Ethereum-based DeFi protocols.