The creation of Wrapped Bitcoin brings the world's leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin into the world of Ethereum's DeFi ecosystem. The WBTC token adheres to the ERC-20 token standard, with tokens created for those who want to convert BTC into WBTC.

All to-be-converted BTC is held by a custodian, who takes part in the actual minting and burning of Ethereum-based tokens. When WBTCs are burned, the user can reclaim their BTC balance from the custodian. During mining, users send BTC to the custodian for storage and receive an equivalent in WBTC tokens. BitGo is the biggest custodian for Wrapped Bitcoin, and they will mine a certain number of WBTC and send them to the merchant's Ethereum address.

The user who wants to swap between wBTC and BTC performs a trade — through a centralized exchange or atomic swap on a decentralized exchange — to move funds to the merchant. Once finalized, the user can use their BTC/wBTC as they see fit. If WBTC is converted to BTC, the associated Wrapped Bitcoin balance will be destroyed through a burn transaction.

The WBTC DAO consists of governing members who decide on significant upgrades and changes to the protocol. Additionally, these members can serve as merchants or custodians managing BTC assets.

As Wrapped Bitcoin tokens adhere to the ERC-20 token standard, one can use them across the broader Ethereum ecosystem. That includes trading them on decentralized exchanges — like Uniswap, 1Inch, Sushiswap — and exploring decentralized finance opportunities through protocols and platforms supporting WBTC.

DeFi opportunities for WBTC range from lending and borrowing to yield farming, token swapping and liquidity pools. Various protocols and platforms support Wrapped Bitcoin, including Aave, Balancer, Compound, MakerDAO. Some of these providers may issue platform-native governance tokens as an extra incentive.

Using WBTC as colateral for a crypto-backed loan can be a significant option for businesses. Additionally WBTC holders can earn interest from supplying liquidity, although the APY will be relatively low.

Another option for WBTC is to engage in margin trading, where Wrapped Bitcoin is used to margin trade Ethereum, stablecoins and other ERC-20 tokens. Users deploy WBTC to enhance fund security while trading. That process is fully non-custodial and powered by smart contract technology.

The Wrapped Tokens project, of which WBTC is a part, wasn’t founded by individuals but is rather a joint project of three organizations: BitGo, Kyber Network and Ren.

BitGo, co-founded in 2013 by American computer scientist and entrepreneur Mike Belshe, is an institutional digital asset custody, trading and financial services firm. In addition to being one of the developers of WBTC, BitGo also serves as its original custodian — the entity that holds WBTC tokens and the keys needed to mint more of them.

Kyber Network is an on-blockchain liquidity protocol that enables the integration of different cryptocurrency tokens and DeFi applications. It was founded in 2017 by Loi Luu, Victor Tran and Yaron Velner and is based in Singapore. Along with Ren, Kyber Network has helped create WBTC and still serves as a merchant on its network — the institution that mints and burns WBTC tokens to maintain the 1:1 ratio of tokens to BTC reserves.

Similarly to Kyber, Ren is a company focused on cross-blockchain integration of cryptocurrency assets and DeFi applications via solutions such as RenBridge, RenVM and others. It was founded in 2017 by Taiyang Zhang and Loong Wang.

By virtue of being the oldest and largest cryptocurrency on the market, Bitcoin can boast a massive user base and a liquidity pool of several dozen billion dollars. However, its blockchain functionality is relatively basic by modern standards.

Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum was built from the ground up to support more advanced use cases by utilizing the technology of smart contracts, giving rise to an entire industry dubbed “decentralized finance.”

Ethereum and products derived from it offer their users such advanced financial instruments as lending and insurance, which do not rely on trusted intermediaries.

By “wrapping” BTC in the ERC-20 standard, WBTC enables full integration of a Bitcoin-like asset into this advanced environment of financial decentralized applications, bringing along the immense liquidity associated with the BTC market.

In addition, Wrapped Bitcoin makes the job significantly easier for exchanges, wallets and payment services that work with Ethereum: instead of having to run two separate nodes for ETH and BTC networks, they can support WBTC operations with just an Ethereum node.

Finally, Ethereum blockchain’s faster average blocktime — about 15 seconds vs 10 minutes respectively — increases the speed with which WBTC can be transacted, compared to actual bitcoins.

There is no predetermined schedule of WBTC issuance. Instead, WBTC is automatically minted or burned whenever users purchase or sell their tokens for Bitcoin via a system of merchants and custodians.

Because Wrapped Bitcoin is always backed by Bitcoin at a 1:1 ratio, the number of tokens in circulation is directly dependent on the amount of Bitcoin reserves in the WBTC network. As of October 2020, that number was just over 94,000 tokens, worth approximately $1 billion in total.

You can buy WBTC on several exchanges, both centralized and decentralized ones, which serve as merchants on the Wrapped Bitcoin network. Some of the major ones include:

• Uniswap
• Binance
• OKEx
• Huobi Global
• Kyber Network

Learn more about other Bitcoin-pegged tokens on the Ethereum network, like renBTC and HBTC.

Check out our educational deep dive into how Ren is bringing Bitcoin to DeFi.

CMC Alexandria has a basic into to Wrapped Bitcoin right here.