Bitcoin sets another milestone as one percent of its circulating supply exists as WBTC. Wrapped BTC (WBTC) is an ERC20 token, thus existing on the ethereum blockchain and is integrated into ethereum wallets and dApps.
The 1 % of wrapped BTC, worth approximately $6.2 billion is under the guardianship of BitGo, a company which launched WBTC in January 2019. To this effect, Etherscan reports that the 187,610 Wrapped BTC equates to $6.18 billion fully diluted market capitalization of the circulating supply pegged at around 18.73 million.
Similarly, BTConEthereum confirms that about 240,620 bitcoins have so far been wrapped in various protocols which include Huobi, Ren and others. Specifically, there are about 37,906 Huobi BTC, 10,226 RenBTC, 1,471 synthetic BTC, 1,169 imBTC and 916 TBTC.
One reason for the tokenization of BTC is to enable the participation of BTC in yield farming and interest bearing protocols that exist on the ethereum blockchain. Also, people can use wrapped BTC as collateral when borrowing from various ethereum based DeFi programmes. Top lending protocols including MakerDAO, Compound, Kyber Network, AAVE, Uniswap and Balancer allow users to deposit wrapped BTC as collateral.
In a related development, Coinshares reports that there is an increase in the outflow of BTC from institutional investment products. As a result, there was over $141 million worth of BTC outflow from various investment portfolios, signalling that institutions are bearish about it.
This is a continuation from the heavy BTC disposal by institutions since mid May when the world witnessed one of the worst crypto market crashes of all times. Statistics show that many corporate organizations are selling off their BTC. For example, institutions withdrew a total of $100 million worth of BTC between 10 and 16 May. Furthermore, Coinshares shows that there was a drop of about 62 % in the trading activity of BTC over recent days.
Conversely, the increase in institutional withdrawal of funds in BTC related projects coincides with a rise in corporate investment in ethereum-based products, despite ETH transaction fees being very high.
There has also been a surge in investment in Ripple and Cardano, which are both within the top 10 best cryptocurrencies by market cap. Within the week Ripple received inflows of over $7 million while Cardano had over $4.5 million.
The other interesting statistics relate to the trading volumes of major cryptocurrencies. According to CoinMarketCap, within the last 24 hours ETH had a trading volume of $38.3 billion, Tether had $$88, 7 billion, in the same period, while bitcoin traded $43, 7 billion.
These statistics still show the dominance of BTC and Ether.
