Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) went live on Ethereum at the beginning of 2019. It is an ERC-20 token backed 1:1 with real Bitcoin and is intended to capture the benefits that can result from the tokenization of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Such as integrating Bitcoin’s liquidity with Ethereum-based decentralized applications (dapps) and decentralized exchange.
Key Takeaways
- Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) is one of the emerging coins on Kyber showing an increased average trading volume in May of 31% compared to April 2020.
- ETH/WBTC and WBTC/ETH trading pairs have already generated 60% of April trading volumes within 10 days of May.
- It is still too early to say but we expect that WBTC trading volumes reached there highest points already in May 2020.
Last week, MakerDao announced WBTC was to be included in their collateral family as an increasingly important role for BTC in the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem becomes apparent. With more and more options for bringing BTC over to the leading smart contract platform emerge, BTC holders can now begin to capitalize on the diverse range of DeFi protocols available in the Ethereum economy.
This may be the cause of the current Wrapped Bitcoin market cap. An increase could be observed at the time of writing reaching more than 11M USD.
At the beginning of May, we observe that WBTC’s average daily trading volume increased by 30 % or 15M USD daily in May, compared to April 2020.
WBTC holds 11% of the total trading volume during 2020 and is the 6th most traded coin on the Kyber Network at the time of writing.
The majority of the volume was generated by pairs of ETH/WBTC and WBTC/ETH but USDC/WBTC seems to be also very popular.
Conclusion
MakerDao adding WBTC as collateral could be a game-changer in the world of trading. It’s still early to say but increasing average daily trading volumes in May on Kyber of 30% lead us to believe that it could change the popularity of traded pairs drastically.
