Bitcoin inflow onto Ethereum hits USD 1.2B as Alameda Research Mints USD 25M Wrapped Bitcoin Block

September 25, 2020
By Benson Toti

With over $1.2 billion in Bitcoin now on Ethereum for DeFi use, Alameda Research continues to lead the with another $25 million worth of WBTC in a historic mint.

Although Bitcoin’s price has over the past week retraced to lows of $10k and then capped below $10,800, one metric that has kept growing is the number of Bitcoin inflows into decentralized finance.

Since July, Bitcoin tokens on Ethereum have jumped 10%, hitting over $1 billion in value.

Meanwhile, whales have moved over $120 million worth of Bitcoin from wallets and exchanges in the past 24 hours. According to Whale Alert, seven huge transactions of up to 3,500 bitcoins in a single batch were observed from Binance to various unknown wallets.

Alameda Research mints historic quantity of WBTC

In mid-September, about 100,000 bitcoins were on Ethereum. That number had risen to 114,077 Bitcoin tokens as of September 25th (10:00 UTC), according to data tracked by Dune Analytics.

Of this number, the largest percentage is in the ERC-20 token Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC). According to Elias Simos of Dune Analytics, nearly three-quarters of all the Bitcoin tokenized on Ethereum is minted in WBTC to allow BTC holders to participate in the decentralized finance space (mostly in yield farming).

Wrapped Bitcoin provides for 73.6% of the minted synthetic Bitcoin. The second-largest tokenized BTC is in the form of renBTC at 18.4% and a distant third going to HBTC with   4.22% of the market share.

More than 83,000 WBTC have been minted on the Ethereum network as of writing, with the largest share controlled by Alameda Research, a trading platform co-founded by FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.

Per data on crypto tracking site Nansen, Alameda Research has minted more than 37,600 WBTC tokens so far. The company minting the second-largest share of WBTC is CoinList with 29,000 tokens, while imToken ranks third with nearly 9,000 synthetic Bitcoins.

On September 25th, Alameda Research made history after minting 2,317 Wrapped Bitcoin tokens worth about $25 million. It, therefore, meant the company had surpassed the 2,316 WBTC that Three Arrows Capital successfully minted on September 24th.