Author: crv.mktcap.eth, crypto KOL; Translation: 0xxz@黄金财经
Last week, BitGo announced it would hand over control of WBTC, sparking concerns over the health of wrapped BTC the following weekend.
Why are some concerned about Justin Sun having greater strategic power over WBTC?
Those who were part of the DeFi boom may remember Sun Chenyu’s previous Bitcoin wrapper HBTC, but it performed poorly. Currently, its trading price is closer to USDT than BTC.
This time it will be different.
The savvy Sun Chenyu quickly clarified his exact role in the ecosystem. Nevertheless, DeFi users initiated a serious discussion about what role WBTC plays in the ecosystem.
WBTC has been criticized for its relative centralization, however, the largest BTC wrapper product stands out from the competition.
CurveFinance notably aggregated WBTC with Ren’s renBTC and Synthetix’s sBTC, both of which are now defunct products.
Are there any other options besides WBTC? So far, there is no perfect solution.
One tempting option is frxBTC, which is rumored to be ready soon. Although tempting, degens's request is "now, immediately, right away."
Avax also has a custody solution BTC.B.
The most obvious alternative to WBTC is Threshold Network’s tBTC. In addition to being more decentralized, tBTC also exhibits the Lindy effect at scale:
• v1: 4 years
• v2: 1.5 years
After BitGo’s announcement, MakerDAO debated the closure of all WBTC debt. However, constituting about 10% of DAI backing, abandoning WBTC would require a strong replacement. It’s no surprise that tBTC came into the spotlight:
tBTC has a good DeFi adoption rate. It is widely used on Curve Finance. In addition to being actively traded in major stable and volatility pools, tBTC also supports the crvUSD stablecoin.
Some traders have already started rotating their trades:
Will this storm really cause tBTC/WBTC to plummet? Shortly after the announcement, the hourly chart showed some price movement. But we don’t expect a plunge to happen immediately.
The market caps of both wrapped BTC tokens have remained fairly stable over the past week. Even though they have been much discussed, neither has shown major inflows or outflows.
The market capitalizations of the two are quite different:
WBTC：15.5BTC
tBTC：3000 BTC
This is indeed a “crazy moat!” WBTC operates on the thinnest of margins. Netting only $12.7 million in fees on $9 billion worth of BTC.
Therefore, WBTC is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. The liquidity and integrations it has accumulated over so many cycles will not be replaced anytime soon, especially if the delegate continues to operate and maintain the peg.
Still, if you want to promote a more decentralized future, you might want to consider minting tBTC the next time you want to bridge BTC to ETH.
For more information on how to use tBTC, please refer to:
