Coinbase Expands cbBTC to Solana, Expanding DeFi Options for Bitcoin Holders

Coinbase has announced the expansion of its leveraged Bitcoin product cbBTC to the Solana blockchain. Originally launched in September, cbBTC was initially only available on Ethereum and Coinbase's proprietary Layer 2 Base blockchain.

Now on Solana, it exists as a Solana Program Library (SPL) token, which can represent both perishable and nonperishable assets.

Coinbase's cbBTC first works on Solana

At launch, cbBTC will integrate with popular Solana Diff platforms including Jupiter Exchange, Meteora, Kamino Finance, Gito, Phoenix, Drift Protocol, Radium, Orca, Thrift Finance (formerly Solund), Manifest and Loopscale Labs.

This move reflects Coinbase's efforts to expand the reach of CbBTC beyond the Ethereum ecosystem. Coinbase has previously said:

“Coinbase is pioneering a new era of DeFi with cbBTC – a trusted and popular blockchain version of Bitcoin. cbBTC is backed 1:1 by BTC and is held by Coinbase – a 10+ year track record of securely holding billions in Bitcoin for institutions and clients around the world. Ever since the conception of CBBTC, greater transparency with backup verification will continue to be part of our roadmap.

Additionally, in a separate announcement, Coinbase also revealed that cbBTC's market capitalization reached the milestone of $1 billion within nine weeks of launch.

Proliferation of sealed bitcoin tokens.

The market for packaged Bitcoin tokens is expanding as more providers enter the space. The main purpose of these tokens is to enable BTC holders to connect to other networks and DeFi applications outside of Bitcoin without losing their holdings. Backed 1:1 by Bitcoin, capped BTC tokens are mostly on Ethereum.

The first WBTC was launched by BitGo in 2019 and is the largest with a supply of around 150,000 and a market cap of $11.18 billion. Later introductions in 2020 include HBTC by HTX, tBTC by Threshold Network and renBTC by Ren Protocol.

In addition to Coinbase, Kraken also launched its own wrapped Bitcoin token this year called kBTC. The token has been made available on both Ethereum and OP Mainnet.