Everscale Partner
The total value of bitcoins fixed on the Ethereum blockchain via the Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) protocol has recently exceeded $ 230 million, while the sum of assets in the second-tier Lightning Network scaling network remains below $ 12 million. Three months ago, the two solutions were at the same levels, according to the data analytical platform Skew.
The growth of WBTC speaks to the continuing desire of bitcoin owners to use it in the Ethereum system. This is primarily due to the dramatically increased popularity of DeFi projects and the earning opportunities they offer. At the same time, the Lightning Network, despite all the recent improvements, is currently not of such interest.
WBTC is the product of a centralized collaboration of several DeFi protocols, including Maker, Compound, Kyber Network, and Aave. They help fix Bitcoin on the Ethereum blockchain to issue ERC20 WBTC tokens of equivalent value.
Besides WBTC with over 20,000 BTC, there is renBTC from the Ren Protocol, which has also shown impressive growth since May and now contains about 10% of all tokenized bitcoins on the Ethereum blockchain. Unlike WBTC, which is managed by a group of custodians, renBTC relies on a decentralized model. In total, over 25,500 BTC ($ 287.5 million) have been placed on the Ethereum blockchain to date.
The Lightning Network, on the other hand, is designed to improve transaction speed and lower fees when Bitcoin moves. Blockstream recently introduced an updated c-lightning implementation with improved support for multipart payments to transfer large amounts of cryptocurrency that might otherwise be rejected by the network due to lack of liquidity.
Over the past 30 days, the Lightning Network has added more than 260 new nodes, but the throughput or the number of bitcoins available for transactions during the same time has grown by less than 1%. However, while the trend of rising fees on the Bitcoin mainnet continues, users can turn to the Lightning Network to save money and speed up payments.
