1% of Bitcoin’s supply has been locked in the WBTC protocol

One percent of Bitcoin’s circulating supply is currently tokenized as Wrapped BTC (WBTC), equating to nearly $6.2 billion worth of BTC. 

The milestone was acknowledged by the product manager of crypto custody firm BitGo, Kia Mosayeri, who tweeted the news on June 7. BitGo is the custodian for the Wrapped Bitcoin protocol, which was launched its Bitcoin-backed ERC-20 token WBTC on Ethereum in January 2019.

1% of all BTC has been wrapped into $WBTC! https://t.co/jOi0LZZUyi

— WBTC (@WrappedBTC) June 7, 2021

According to Etherscan, there are currently 187,610 Bitcoins wrapped on the protocol, equating to a fully diluted market capitalization of $6.18 billion. The current circulating supply of BTC is nearly 18.73 million, according to CoinGecko, confirming the 1% milestone.

BTConEthereum estimates there are 240,620 Bitcoins that have been tokenized across various protocols for use on Ethereum, representing a combined capitalization of $7.91 billion. Wrapped Bitcoin exerts a clear dominance over the sector, representing 78% of all Bitcoin tokenized on Ethereum.

Other leading Bitcoin tokenization protocols include second-ranked Huobi BTC with 37,906 BTC or 15.7% of the Bitcoin's supply, and the third-ranked RenBTC with 10,226 tokenized BTC. Synthetic BTC also holds 1,471 BTC, followed by imBTC with 1,169 Bitcoin, and TBTC with 916 BTC.

The recent proliferation of yield farms and interest-bearing Ethereum-based DeFi protocols supporting tokenized BTC has been the primary force driving the sector’s growth.

In late April, Ethereum-based BTC yield protocol BadgerDAO teamed up with RenVM to launch a bridge between renBTC and its own yield farms. DeFi Llama estimates that more than $540 million worth of assets is locked on the BadgerDAO platform.