Wrapped Bitcoins Locked in Ethereum & How it Compares to the Lightning Network 

Price movement is the main thing that the crypto markets are focused on. The price movements of all the cryptocurrencies over the past month or two have seen many fundamental metrics go and some pretty significant changes.

WBTC has been spearheading the crucial development in the ecosystem since the 19th of January this year. For those that don’t know, WBTC (wrapped bitcoin) is an ERC20 based token on Ethereum which is tied with the actual leading cryptocurrency, bitcoin.

The volume of Bitcoin that is currently locked in WBTC over the past month has been slowly but surely increasing. At the current time, the amount of wrapped bitcoin locked in the Ethereum blockchain is worth just over $8 million. Whereas the bitcoin lightning network also saw a major surge over the same time period, the rise of WBTC locked in Ethereum could indicate that a part of bitcoins liquidity is currently being is currently going into the Ethereum blockchain.

It’s also worth noting that the total value locked in wrapped bitcoin saw an all-time high with its recent skyrocket in price. This was a development that indicated the increased usage of the decentralised finance token on the ETH blockchain.

With more liquidity going into the DeFi ecosystem, we are seeing a positive sign in the development side of things. One of the main arguments that were made by the community is the custodial nature of WBTC. Along with the Kyber network and Ren, Bitgo released the new form of bitcoin around two years ago in 2018.

This kind of structure echoes that of centralisation with this custodian also charging a fee when a merchant mints or burns wrapped bitcoin.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. For more news on this and other crypto updates, keep it with CryptoDaily!