About Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC)
Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) is a wrapped form of Bitcoin developed to give Bitcoin holders the ability to participate in popular decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols that were popularized by on and by the Ethereum network. WBTC is an ERC-20 token and therefore, gives Ethereum the advantage of inviting liquidity from the Bitcoin ecosystem onto the Ethereum network.
In order to create WBTC tokens, BTC holders submit requests to obtain newly issued tokens from a merchant who performs KYC and AML (Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering) checks. The merchant then initiates the required transaction with an official custodian in order to mint the WBTC tokens before sending them into the custody of the merchant.
At this point, the requesting customer is able to swap BTC for WBTC with the merchant via a centralized exchange (CEX), decentralized exchange (DEX), or atomic swap. It is important to note that only merchants are empowered to redeem WBTC for BTC tokens in this protected process.
Due to the purpose of Wrapped Bitcoin and its unique minting process, there is a low circulating supply of WBTC. This is always the same as the total maximum supply, since it grows only as new tokens are minted. Currently, 210,1450 WBTC tokens are in active circulation. Live WBTC price can be viewed on Binance at any time.