2 weeks ago
According to a Sept. 3 statement, 21.co, the genitor institution of 21Shares, has introduced its Wrapped Bitcoin merchandise (21BTC) connected the Ethereum blockchain.
The institution stated that it was collaborating with Flow Traders, a starring planetary marketplace maker, to motorboat a merchandise that would springiness customers “peace of caput arsenic they research decentralized applications and caller opportunities connected the Ethereum blockchain.”
21.co’s 21BTC aims to disagree from competing products successful the marketplace due to the fact that it securely stores the underlying assets successful acold storage, eliminating the request for a bridge.
Eliezer Ndinga, caput of strategy and concern improvement astatine 21.co, stated:
“As 1 of the world’s largest issuers of crypto ETPs, we bring stringent plus absorption champion practices and our operational excellence to the satellite of wrapped assets, involving institutional-grade custodians and information protocols.”
Bitcoin wrappers are ERC-20 tokens backed by BTC, issued connected assorted blockchains, backed one-to-one by BTC, and held by a centralized custodian. To redeem, holders pain the tokens to person autochthonal BTC, portion minting involves depositing autochthonal Bitcoin to person the tokens.
WBTC faces struggles
The motorboat of 21BTC coincides with challenges faced by WBTC, the astir fashionable Bitcoin wrapper with a marketplace capitalization of astir $9 billion.
Over the past month, WBTC has been nether accrued scrutiny owed to issues involving BitGo and TRON laminitis Justin Sun. On Aug. 9, BitGo announced plans to transportation power of WBTC to a associated task with crypto custody level BiT Global and Sun.
This announcement raised concerns wrong the community, peculiarly astir Sun’s engagement successful the project.
In response, the lending protocol Sky (formerly MakerDAO) voted to halt caller users from borrowing against WBTC, and demand for the plus declined. Dune Analytics data shows that WBTC’s proviso decreased by implicit 1,000 tokens past month, marking the third-highest monthly antagonistic alteration this year.
In airy of these developments, respective competitors, including Coinbase, are seeking to challenge BitGo’s market dominance. Further, DeFi protocol Threshold has proposed merging its BTC “wrapper” token, tBTC, with WBTC successful an effort to prevention the much fashionable BTC product.
The station 21Shares launches wrapped Bitcoin 21BTC connected Ethereum amid WBTC challenges appeared archetypal connected CryptoSlate.
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