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Wrapped Bitcoin (BTC) is a tokenized version of Bitcoin that operates on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain.
WBTC is ERC-20 compliant, which allows it to be fully integrated into the Ethereum blockchain’s ecosystem of decentralized exchanges, crypto lending services, prediction markets, and other ERC-20-enabled decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.
WBTC is also backed by Bitcoin at a 1:1 ratio through a network of automatically monitored merchants and custodians, ensuring that its price is always pegged to Bitcoin and allowing users to transfer liquidity between the BTC and ETH networks in a decentralized and autonomous fashion.
Wrapped Bitcoin was announced on October 26, 2018, and went live on January 31, 2019.
The Wrapped Tokens project, of which WBTC is a part, was created collaboratively by three organizations: BitGo, Kyber Network, and Ren.
BitGo is an institutional digital asset custody, trading, and financial services firm co-founded in 2013 by American computer scientist and entrepreneur Mike Belshe. BitGo, in addition to being one of WBTC’s developers, is also its original custodian — the entity that holds WBTC tokens and the keys required to mint more of them.
Kyber Network is an on-chain liquidity protocol that allows different cryptocurrency tokens and DeFi applications to be integrated. It was founded in 2017 in Singapore by Loi Luu, Victor Tran, and Yaron Velner. Kyber Network, along with Ren, helped create WBTC and is still a merchant on its network — the institution that mints and burns WBTC tokens to maintain the 1:1 token-to-BTC reserve ratio.
Ren, like Kyber, is a company that focuses on cross-blockchain integration of cryptocurrency assets and DeFi applications through solutions like RenBridge, RenVM, and others. Taiyang Zhang and Loong Wang founded it in 2017.
