Side-Chaining $3 Billion in Value: There's More Than 141,000 Tokenized Bitcoins Issued on Ethereum

According to onchain statistics, there is a colossal amount of bitcoin, approximately 141,231 bitcoins or $3.3 billion at the time of publication locked into Ethereum-based tokens. There are roughly seven different wrapped or synthetic bitcoin tokens but the Wrapped Bitcoin project has the lion’s share of coins with 115,411 under custody.

At the time of writing, there is a great number of bitcoin (BTC) locked into the Ethereum (ETH) network for projects that have issued wrapped or synthetic BTC tokens. Right now there’s 141,231 BTC being leveraged on Ethereum between seven different projects. The largest of them all is the Wrapped Bitcoin project (WBTC), which is an ERC20 token but the BTC is held in a custodial fashion by the firm Bitgo. At press time, the WBTC project commands a whopping 115,411 BTC which is worth $2.6 billion using today’s exchange rates.

The six projects below BTC collectively hold 28,151 BTC ($677.7M) at the time of publication, according to Dune Analytics data. This includes projects like renbtc (17,122), hbtc (6,010), tbtc (1,906), sbtc (1,903), imbtc (1,035), and pbtc (175). Moving a wrapped or synthetic bitcoin would be far cheaper as the current median cost of transfer on the Ethereum chain today is $0.54 per transaction. The next block fee for the BTC network is $7.68 per transaction and the current median fee for BTC today is $3.71.

A great deal of wrapped or synthetic bitcoin tokens on Ethereum leveraged on decentralized exchanges (dex) and loan platforms that yield high interest. During the last seven days, ETH-based dex applications like Uniswap and 0x have seen $5.5 billion in swaps and $579 million in trades during the last 24 hours.

WBTC is the sixth-largest token in terms of the share of loans for the top ten ERC20 assets. As far as outstanding loans per asset is concerned there’s roughly $45 million worth of WBTC on loan today.

It didn’t take long for the Ethereum network to gather a lot more bitcoin since tokenized BTC assets held on ETH crossed $1 billion notional at the end of September. Of course, the price of bitcoin (BTC) jumping 129% during the last three months contributed to the value held.

Despite the detractors, Ethereum clearly is Bitcoin’s main sidechain as competitors are not even close to 141,231 BTC being leveraged on the ETH chain.

For instance, Blockstream’s Liquid network only has 2,599 lbtc issued and the RSK sidechain has a circulating supply of 541 rbtc. WBTC is the second-largest decentralized finance (defi) project according to defipulse.com statistics. Due to BTC’s current value, WBTC’s market is also the 16th-largest by market capitalization today.