There have been a lot of discussions today about "WBTC custody changes" - MakerDAO's new proposal considers closing new WBTC lending and reducing Spark's WBTC lending ratio to 0; Sun Ge came out to clarify, and Jupiter Lianchuang also published an article to express doubts

This post will sort out the relevant data of $WBTC to help everyone better understand how important this familiar but somewhat unfamiliar asset is to the current crypto ecosystem

1/ The Origin of WBTC

WBTC (Wrapped Bitcoin) is an ER20 token issued on the Ethereum network, and its value is pegged to Bitcoin at a one-to-one ratio; each WBTC has a corresponding Bitcoin as a reserve, which is managed by a custodian (currently Bitgo), ensuring that WBTC holders can redeem it for Bitcoin at any time.

WBTC was first proposed in 2017, and the white paper was officially released and put into use in 2019. By 2020, the scale of locked BTC has exceeded 2.1 billion US dollars, making it a well-deserved "bridge between Bitcoin and Ethereum".

2/ WBTC data

Currently, WBTC supports Ethereum / Base / Kave / Osmosis / Tron networks, of which Ethereum mainnet accounts for 99.8%. As of today, 154,726 WBTC (worth $9.45 billion) have been minted, accounting for 0.78% of the total market value of Bitcoin.

Data from Dune's "WBTC: Supply Dynamics" panel shows that more than 41% of WBTC is currently used in the lending ecosystem, with MakerDAO being the largest use case (acceptor), and nearly 32% being used for direct transactions.

Data Dashboard 👉 https://dune.com/21co/wbtc

3/ WBTC proofreading information

The impact on the security and actual use of WBTC is currently unclear. If you want to learn more about WBTC partners/specific transactions for minting and destruction/BTC escrow addresses, you can go to https://wbtc.network/dashboard to find relevant information. The official disclosure is very complete.