Circle, the financial technology company best known for creating the widely used USDC stablecoin, has announced the upcoming launch of Circle Wrapped Bitcoin (cirBTC). The token is supposed to bridge the bellwether cryptocurrency into the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystem.
What exactly is cirBTC?
The native Bitcoin blockchain does not natively support complex smart contracts. One cannot directly use actual Bitcoin in Ethereum-based DeFi apps (like lending protocols or decentralized exchanges). To solve this, the industry uses “wrapped” tokens.
cirBTC is Circle’s version of a wrapped token. Circle holds exactly one real Bitcoin (BTC) in its reserve for every cirBTC. In such a way, it will maintain the peg at exactly 1:1 to the price of native Bitcoin.
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Currently, there is over $1.7 trillion worth of Bitcoin sitting completely outside of the blossoming DeFi ecosystem. Many institutional investors want to earn yield on their BTC using DeFi, but many existing wrapped Bitcoin products rely on opaque third-party custodians or complex setups where it is difficult to verify if the underlying BTC is actually secure. Circle created cirBTC to fix this “trust gap.” The reserves of cirBTC will be verifiable on-chain in real time.
Circle’s key products
The USDC stablecoin remains Circle’s flagship product. It is the world’s leading regulated digital dollar. It is fully backed 1:1 by cash and short-term U.S. Treasuries.
It has also introduced EURC, which is a regulated stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the Euro. It provides a secure, fully reserved digital euro for the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.
It also offers USYC, which is a tokenized money market fund aimed at institutional investors.
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