CoinList mints largest ever single-day quantity of WBTC
Quick Take
- CoinList minted its largest ever quantity of WBTC today.
- CoinList CEO Graham Jenkin told The Block that the demand for WBTC is soaring mainly because “bitcoin wealthy individuals want to put their latent BTC to work and earn yield without giving up their holdings.”
Token sale platform CoinList says that today it minted the most WBTC ever produced in a single day.
The feat occurred via two separate transactions. The first transaction minted 1,300 WBTC, the ERC-20 token backed 1:1 by bitcoin. The second minted a record 3,700 WBTC, CoinList CEO Graham Jenkin told The Block. The total 5,000 WBTC mint (worth about $57 million) is the largest ever by any firm in a single day, said Jenkin.
Bitcoin holders can use WBTC to participate in Ethereum-based decentralized finance (DeFi) applications like "yield farming" without actually giving up their bitcoin. Indeed, Graham told The Block that the demand for WBTC is soaring mainly because "bitcoin wealthy individuals want to put their latent BTC to work and earn yield without giving up their holdings."
"Liquidity pools (e.g. Uniswap) are the primary destination for WBTC," he added.
CoinList is a WBTC merchant, meaning that it handles know-your-customer checks and provides free WBTC and bitcoin wallets to customers. Jenkin said market makers and decentralized exchanges have mainly been driving WBTC's demand, but that in the last few months, retail and over-the-counter (OTC) markets have also "really picked up."
MakerDAO recently added WBTC as collateral, and demand for it has "just grown from there," said Jenkin.
Before today, the largest single WBTC mint was 2,317 tokens, executed in September by crypto trading firm Alameda Research. The mint was worth about $25 million at the time.
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