$6.2 Billion Worth of BTC Locked In The WBTC Protocol
According to Kia Mosayeri, BitGo’s product manager, wrapped bitcoin (WBTC) contains one percent of bitcoin currently in circulation, which is about $6.3 billion BTC worth. Bitgo is a crypto custody company, and it’s the current custodian for WBTC protocol. The protocol inaugurated its BTC-supported ERC-20 token WBTC on eth two years ago.
Kia Mosayeri tweet. Source: Twitter
Etherscan Confirms Mosayeri’s Claims
Etherscan reports that about 188,000 bitcoins are wrapped on the WBTC protocol right now, and that represents about $6.2 billion in market cap. New evidence affirms Kia Mosayeri’s claims as there is about 18.8 million Bitcoin currently in circulation. Per the BTConethereum, various protocols have a combined 241,000 bitcoin tokens, which they can deploy on Ethereum, and the total market cap for these bitcoin tokens is about $8 billion. Wrapped bitcoin is dominant in this space as it represents nearly 80% of bitcoin tokenized on Ethereum.
The Top Bitcoin Tokenization Protocols
Besides BitGo, Huobi BTC, renBTC, synthetic BTC, imBTC, and TBTC completes the top six bitcoin tokenization protocols. Each of these protocols possess the following percentage of bitcoin tokens in circulation: Huobi (16%, approx. 38,000 BTC), renBTC (10,226 BTC), Synthetic BTC (1,472 BTC), imBTC (1,200 BTC) and TBTC (917 BTC).
One primary reason for the growing popularity of this space is the recent increase in the number of yield farms and interest-bearing Defi protocols built on Ethereum and supports tokenized BTC. For example, about two months ago, Badgerdao and renVM collaborated to inaugurate a link between renBTC and its yield farms. As a result, Defi llama suggests that the Badgerdao platform (an Ethereum-based BTC yield protocol) contains almost $545 million worth of assets.
The start of this year has seen a 100,000 increase in the amount of tokenized bitcoin, showing a sharp growth rate. The tokenization process involves locking an amount of bitcoin and issuing its equivalent number of tokens on Ethereum.
These BTC-backed tokens are fixed at bitcoin price but are still helpful for Defi platforms and other protocols. Sometimes, the tokenization process is reversed; this reversal involves releasing the bitcoin and destroying the tokens.
US Justice Department Seized 63.7 Bitcoins
Meanwhile, in its efforts to fight illicit cryptocurrency ownership and transaction, the US justice department has revealed today that it seized bitcoins worth about $2.4 million from Darkside – a criminal “ransomware-as-a-service” group.
The bitcoins were ransom payments to the group to reopen the colonial pipeline after claiming responsibility for the shutdown on May 14, 2021. In addition, the group was able to seize the company’s internet servers and cryptocurrency stash.
A Krebs on security report revealed that the attackers could only affect the Colonial Pipeline’s IT networks but only shut down their pipeline as a security measure. The Northern District of California’s acting attorney, Stephanie Hinds, remarked that “these blackmailers will never have access to this cash. This case proves our strong commitment to ensuring the use of these new payment methods for strictly legitimate purposes.”
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