The largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, Coinbase, has launched its wrapped version of Bitcoin on the Layer-1 Solana blockchain in a bid to expand the adoption of this asset in DeFi.
"This is the first token Coinbase has issued on Solana, and with it, we are excited to provide easy access to BTC," the company stated in a post on X announcing the deployment on November 7.
Coinbase further stated that cbBTC will exist as a Solana Program Library (SPL) Token, a type of token on the Solana platform that can represent both fungible and non-fungible assets.
"This token is backed 1:1 by Bitcoin and allows users to utilize Bitcoin within the DeFi ecosystem of Solana," the company added.
They listed several decentralized exchanges and Solana-based DeFi protocols where cbBTC will be available, including Jupiter, Meteora, Kamino Finance, Raydium, Phoenix, Jito, and Drift.
"Bitcoin is king, and the vision is that Kamino will become one of the largest cbBTC venues in DeFi," the development team behind the lending, liquidity, and leverage protocol based on Solana stated.
Source: Coinbase
Coinbase's Country Director in Singapore, Hassan Ahmed, announced the plan to launch cbBTC on Solana and the Breakpoint event in September.
The company has deployed approximately 135 cbBTC worth about 10 million USD for Solana, according to Solana blockchain explorer Solscan.
Additionally, cbBTC fills the gap left by soBTC, a wrapped Bitcoin asset based on Solana that previously lost value and failed during the FTX exchange collapse.
Coinbase's asset is not the only wrapped Bitcoin version on Solana as it joins a growing group of programmable Bitcoin variants on the network, including Threshold's tBTC, Zeus Network's zBTC via Wormhole, the Solana team stated on November 7.
Coinbase's wrapped Bitcoin asset has seen its market capitalization surge past 1 billion USD since its launch in mid-September.
It is competing with rivals BitGo, Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), which has a market capitalization of 11 billion USD and is considered the industry standard available across a range of Layer-1 and Layer-2 networks.
Solana DeFi has significantly recovered in 2024, with total value locked increasing by 250% since the beginning of the year, reaching 8.25 billion USD, according to DefiLlama.
The recovery of Ethereum DeFi has been much slower, but there is still 60 billion USD in TVL, up 72% to date.
The price of SOL has reacted with a 3.4% increase since the announcement, hitting 200 USD in early trading on November 8, according to CoinGecko.
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