U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase has launched its own version of wrapped Bitcoin on Solana’s layer-1 blockchain. This move aims to boost Bitcoin’s use in decentralized finance (DeFi) on Solana. In a Nov. 7 post on X, the company announced:
This is the first token we’ve issued on Solana, and we’re excited to make BTC more accessible.
Coinbase announced that they will launch cbBTC as an SPL token on Solana, which means it’s a type of Solana token representing different kinds of assets, including fungible and non-fungible ones. The company also shared a list of Solana-based decentralized exchanges and DeFi platforms where cbBTC will be accessible, such as Meteora, Drift, Kamino Finance, Jupiter, Raydium, Phoenix, and Jito.
Coinbase’s Singapore country director, Hassan Ahmed, shared at the Breakpoint event in September that they’re ready to launch cbBTC on the Solana network.
cbBTC revives Solana DeFi ecosystem
The company has already introduced 135 cbBTC tokens on Solana, valued at around $10 million, according to the Solscan blockchain explorer. Moreover, cbBTC steps in to fill the gap left by soBTC, a previous Solana-based wrapped Bitcoin asset that lost its peg and failed during the FTX collapse.
According to a Nov. 7 statement from the Solana team, it joins a list of programmable Bitcoin assets on the network, including Threshold’s tBTC, Zeus Network’s zBTC, and WBTC via Wormhole. Since its launch in mid-September, Coinbase’s wrapped Bitcoin asset has quickly grown, with its market cap now exceeding $1 billion.
It’s competing with the more established Wrapped Bitcoin from BitGo, which currently holds a market cap of $11 billion and is widely recognized as the industry standard across various layer-1 and layer-2 networks. Solana’s DeFi ecosystem has made an impressive comeback in 2024, with the total value locked (TVL) growing by 250% since the start of the year, now reaching $8.25 billion, according to DefiLlama.
Ethereum DeFi recovery has been more gradual, but it still leads with a TVL of $60 billion, which has risen by 72% this year. CoinGecko reported that Solana’s price has jumped by 3.4% since the announcement, reaching $200 in early trading on Nov. 8.
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