Tokenized Bitcoin in Circulation Nears a Half Million BTC, Bitcoin-Pegged Token Value Exceeds $21 Billion

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According to data recorded on December 28, there’s approximately 434,265.43 bitcoin-pegged or wrapped bitcoin tokens worth more than $21.3 billion across several blockchains. Ten different bitcoin-pegged projects exist today and the project Wrapped Bitcoin dominates 59.66% of all the tokenized bitcoin in circulation.

Close to a Half Million Tokenized Bitcoin Circulates on Several Blockchains, Wrapped Bitcoin Dominates by 59%

Toward the end of 2018, when tokenization really started heating up in the crypto space, a number of different projects launched bitcoin-pegged token protocols. On January 30, 2018, Bitcoin.com News reported on the Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) project launching on Ethereum.

By the end of July 2019, WBTC eclipsed the Lightning Network (LN) in terms of total value locked. Today, WBTC is the largest bitcoin (BTC)-pegged token project with 259,090 BTC in circulation on the Ethereum network.

Statistics indicate that there are seven BTC-pegged projects on Ethereum and altogether, the seven projects command 323,264 BTC total value locked (TVL). The second-largest tokenized BTC protocol on Ethereum is HBTC with 39,884 BTC.

HBTC is followed by RENBTC (17,054), SBTC (4,203), IMBTC (1,317), PBTC (888), and TBTC (828), respectively. Accordingly, the 323,264 BTC TVL held in Ethereum is 74.43% of the aggregate BTC-pegged tokens in circulation today.

BTCB Dominates by 24%, Tokenized Bitcoin in Circulation Issued by Blockstream, RSK Represent 1.35% of Today’s Tokenized Bitcoin Total

There’s another tokenized BTC protocol that leverages the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) called BTCB that’s just below WBTC in terms of TVL. At the time of writing, there’s around 105,115.44 BTCB in circulation on December 28.

BTCB has a fully diluted market capitalization of around $5.52 billion and $43.6 million in global trade volume. The most active exchanges swapping BTCB today include Hitbtc, Pancakeswap v2, Thorchain, and Pancakeswap v1.

There are also two other tokenized BTC projects operated by Blockstream and RSK. Today, RSK has 2,522 RBTC in circulation, which is also backed by 95 exahash per second (EH/s) of BTC hashpower.

Blockstream’s federated sidechain, Liquid, has around 3,363.99 LBTC in circulation at the time of writing. RSK has around $124 million in tokenized bitcoin in circulation while Liquid’s LBTC value is $165.4 million.

Liquid’s LBTC is only 0.77% of the aggregate tokenized BTC in circulation today across ten protocols. RBTC is even lower as its RBTC assets represent only 0.58% of the 434,265.43 aggregate. At the current trajectory of all the tokenized BTC projects today, there will soon be approximately half a million tokenized BTC leveraged on several alternative chains.

What do you think about the 434K tokenized bitcoin in circulation today? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.