Coinbase has announced that starting from December 19, trading of Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC) will be suspended on its platform. For the crypto-exchange, wBTC no longer meets its listing standards and, at the same time, there will be more space for its version of Wrapped Bitcoin cbBTC.
Coinbase suspends Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC): it no longer meets its listing standards
Coinbase has announced that it will suspend Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC) from its crypto trading platform, starting from December 19. The reason behind this decision is that wBTC no longer meets the listing standards of Coinbase.
https://twitter.com/CoinbaseAssets/status/1858921827159945638
“We regularly check the assets on our exchange to ensure they meet our listing standards. Based on our most recent review, Coinbase will suspend trading of wBTC (wBTC) on December 19, 2024, around 12:00 ET.”
The platforms on which wBTC will soon be delisted are Coinbase.com for simple and advanced trading, Coinbase Exchange, and Coinbase Prime.
At the moment, Coinbase has already set the wBTC order books on the platform to “limit-only” mode. This means that such orders can be placed and canceled, and matches can occur.
Not only that, Coinbase states that users’ wBTC funds will remain accessible and can be withdrawn at any time.
Coinbase suspends wBTC to make room for its Wrapped Bitcoin cbBTC?
This news comes just three months after Coinbase launched its version of Wrapped Bitcoin, called cbBTC.
The hypothesis of the delist of wBTC on Coinbase could also be to make room for the adoption and trading of cbBTC exclusively on the platform.
In practice, Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC) are ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum that represent Bitcoin, so they can be used in decentralized applications (or dApp) of DeFi.
Specifically, the wBTC is a “bridge” solution, as BTC cannot interact directly on other blockchains like Ethereum. In this way, users can “wrap” their BTC on other networks.
By introducing its cbBTC, Coinbase has decided to enter this category of particular assets and “challenge” wBTC.
In fact, cbBTC is designed to be seamlessly integrated on Ethereum and Base networks. Not only that, since the issuer is Coinbase itself, on the platform, users will be able to proceed with the automatic conversion of their BTC into cbBTC on Ethereum or on Base.
The expansion of cbBTC on the Solana network
Recently, the cbBTC of Coinbase was officially launched also on the Solana network.
https://twitter.com/solana/status/1854573991442194754
“Bitcoin – Solana. @Coinbase has officially launched cbBTC on Solana – bringing more Bitcoin value into Solana’s thriving DeFi ecosystem.”
This news had already been announced in September, just two weeks after the launch of Coinbase’s wrapped bitcoin.
In any case, making a comparison between cbBTC and wBTC in terms of adoption, while cbBTC has grown exponentially, wBTC is still far from reaching it. In fact, at the time of writing, the market cap of cbBTC is 1.40 billion dollars compared to 13.6 billion dollars of wBTC.
