The number of Bitcoin locked on Ethereum continues to grow at a fast pace.
A total of 18,221 BTC are now locked in WBTC, which has its market cap reaching a new all-time high as well, in the north of $200 million.
An ERC20 token, Wrapped Bitcoin brings the value and liquidity of Bitcoin to the DeFi world. Here, one WBTC equals one BTC.
Being an Ethereum-based token, it is integrated into Ethereum smart contracts, wallets, and dapps. Also, the transfer of WBTC is faster than the usual bitcoin.
Launched in January 2019 as a collaborative project by Dharma, Compound, Kyber, Maker, Set Protocol, Ren, and BitGo, it is an attempt to bring more liquidity into the Ethereum network as the overall value of Bitcoin is much larger than Ether.
WBTC is used to borrow and lend on platforms like Compound or even for margin trading on the likes of Fulcrum dapp.
The growth of WBTC has eclipsed the layer two solutions on bitcoin, Lightning Network that makes payments on bitcoin faster and cheaper, whose network capacity is stuck under 1,000 BTC.
This growth happened just in the past three months when the market cap of both the Lightning Network and WBTC was at the same level only for the latter to grow by more than 1,600% during this time.
WBTC reaching new ATH in market cap. Lightning struggling to get similar traction for now – both were at the same level only 3mths ago. pic.twitter.com/XcesNLbS9q
— skew (@skewdotcom) August 10, 2020
Recently, Blockstream released its major version of c-lightning, its implementation of the Lightning Network, dubbed “Rat Poison Squared on Steroids.”
This release comes with Multi-part payments (MPP) to improve LN’s user experience, making it easier to support fraud-fighting component Watchtower, and laid the groundwork for a tool that tracks “all” the coin movements of a user for tax purposes.