Wrapped, or what is widely called tokenized Bitcoin, has grown in popularity over the past few months, with more than 100,000 of it valued at almost $1 billion currently in circulation.
This unprecedented rise in tokenized Bitcoin interest has been spurred by the farming boom in the DeFi token. It led to a 1200% rise in collateral tokens within the industry this year alone. With the unprecedented growth, it is proof that Bitcoin investors are putting their holding to use as they are tired of the recent lackluster price of the crypto asset. They all want to have a share of the highly responsive DeFi market action.
High-yielding DeFi farming incentives
As is stands, many investors are investing in high-yielding DeFi farming incentives using their Bitcoin, with the amount of tokenized Bitcoin surging to record levels. Ten days ago, the supply of BTC on the smart contracts development platform stood at 73,000. But the figure has grown to nearly 100,000. As a result, Bitcoin’s supply valuation on Ethereum has crossed $1 billion.
Based on data from a free analytics provider Dune Analytics, the number of tokenized Bitcoin on Ethereum is nearing 100,000, which is exactly 0.5% of the total supply of Bitcoin.
Why the recent surge in tokenized Bitcoin
The majority of DeFi is based on Ethereum, which means naturally BTC cannot work with it. As a result, it needs to be tokenized or wrapped into the ERC-20 form.
Bitcoin has the same value as a tokenized Bitcoin, but the latter can be used on different DeFi platform and dApps based on the Ethereum platform. There is an emerging DeFi farming incentive that offers liquidity pools via different tokenized BTC versions, allowing investors to utilize their holding without any need to put up their Bitcoin for sale.
DefPulse.com revealed that for the past three months, the amount of collateral on xBTC has grown exponentially by 1300%, taking it to an all-time high of $630 million. But RenVM, a custodian and interoperable network for renBTC and DeFi assets revealed its collateral on BTC has grown by 2700% with an all-time high of $270 million.
However, other less popular tokenized versions of BTC still exist, which includes pBTC, imBTC, sBTC, and HBTC.
How users are tokenizing their BTC
Users are tokenizing their Bitcoin holdings on Ethereum using two main methods. They are using the custodian and non-custodian approach. In the first approach, the Bitcoin investor sends all or some of their Bitcoin assets to a centralized custodian while receiving the same value of tokenized Bitcoin in exchange.
However, the non-custodial approach follows a decentralized escrow method through a smart contract.
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