In accordance with an announcement on Sept. 12, Coinbase has formally launched its wrapped Bitcoin token, cbBTC, on its Layer 2 community Base and the Ethereum mainnet.

The brand new product comes a few month after Coinbase teased it on social media platform X.

CBTC

In accordance with Coinbase, cbBTC is an ERC-20 token that’s totally backed by Bitcoin and saved on the platform. When customers ship BTC from Coinbase to Base or Ethereum, it’s robotically transformed to cbBTC and vice versa.

The wrapped Bitcoin token permits customers to leverage their BTC on different networks, and as such, the trade says cbBTC goals to energy progressive monetary purposes and speed up Bitcoin adoption in DeFi.

Already, a number of main DeFi protocols, AveMorpho, Sky, Compound, Aerodrome, Curve, Veda, Mellow, and real-world asset platform Maple. It has already built-in cbBTC for its customers.

Moreover, cbBTC can be accessible via the Coinbase utility in Singapore, the UK, the European Financial Space, Australia, Brazil, and the US (excluding New York State). The asset will even be accessible globally on Base and Ethereum.

Coinbase holds greater than 984,000 BTC, valued at roughly $57 billion, based on knowledge from blockchain analytics agency Arcam Intelligence, whereas most of it’s held by exchange-traded fund (ETF) issuers similar to BlackRock, which shops ETF property on the Brian Armstrong-led trade.

WBTC in bother

Coinbase’s launch of cbBTC comes at an attention-grabbing time because the main Wrapped Bitcoin token issued by BitGo WBTC is dealing with challenges.

Over the previous month, crypto customers have been exploring options to WBTC following BitGo's new partnership with TRON founder Justin Solar, and whereas the corporate has sought to ease these considerations, critics have famous that Solar's involvement poses a menace to the token given his historical past.

Due to this, a number of tasks try to benefit from this aftermath by selling their Bitcoin wrapper merchandise.

Earlier this month, 21Shares' mum or dad firm, 21.co, launched a wrapped Bitcoin product (21BTC) on the Ethereum blockchain after DeFi protocol Threshold proposed merging its BTC “wrapper” token tBTC with WBTC in an effort to salvage its extra common BTC product.

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