Soon there will be another network that allows people to tokenize BTC in order to leverage the underlying blockchain’s speed and fees. On September 24, Bitgo, the custodian of the Wrapped Bitcoin project (WBTC), the most popular tokenized BTC platform to-date, announced a partnership with Tron.
Members of the crypto ecosystem will soon be able to leverage WBTC via the Tron (TRX) network. Just like the tokenized BTC created using Ethereum’s ERC20 token standard, the Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) team will utilize the TRC20 token standard from Tron’s infrastructure. Similarly, all the BTC deposited is backed by the Bitgo Trust, and each WBTC minted on Tron will be worth the same price as one BTC.
“We are excited to expand Tron’s defi potential by partnering with the industry leader Bitgo to bring integral cross-chain solutions such as Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) and Wrapped Ether to Tron,” said Justin Sun, founder of the Tron project and CEO of Bittorrent.
Sun also mentioned that users can utilize a decentralized exchange (dex) that is similar to Uniswap called Justswap. “[Justswap] has achieved $100 million 24-hour volumes since its start and represents Tron’s strong and growing defi ecosystem,” Sun claimed.
WBTC has been an integral part of the decentralized finance (defi) space, and the project commands the most tokenized BTC so far. Between projects like RSK, Liquid, and ETH-based BTC derivatives like WBTC, renBTC, hBTC, sBTC, imBTC, pBTC, tBTC, tzBTC, btc2, and the latest addition on Tron there are over twelve tokenized BTC projects people can choose from today.
The trustless tokenized BTC project called tBTC just recently re-launched and there’s now 83 tBTC ($885k) in circulation on Friday afternoon. Additionally, the Polkadot ecosystem will also see a tokenized BTC project with polkaBTC. Compared to all the tokenized BTC platforms, WBTC eclipses them all with 73% of the supply or 83,983 tokenized BTC assets according to stats from Dune Analytics.
Similarly to when Tether migrated a great majority of USDT to the Ethereum network, the WBTC team says speed and lower fees was one of the reasons to partition some WBTC over to Tron. “Since launching WBTC in 2019, Bitgo has seen tremendous growth on Ethereum coupled with the remarkable rise of defi activity,” said Mike Belshe, CEO, Bitgo.
“Our new strategic alliance with Tron creates even greater opportunities for users to expand to other chains and tokenize their BTC on the Tron dapp ecosystem, while transacting at a lower cost and faster speed,” Belshe added.
What do you think about Bitgo leveraging both Ethereum and Tron to issue WBTC? Let us know in the comments section below.
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