Hacker News Reader

Comment by ENGNR | Hacker News Reader

I think the most interesting development is the increasing amount of Bitcoin being wrapped in Ethereum, somewhat validating the store of value idea, I could see it giving Bitcoin some legs

But... is it like sports memorabilia at that point, the value is all perception rather than utility and could one day just.. collapse

View on HN

I think the wrapped BTCs, especially the decentralized approaches to it, are clever links that allow for the transfer of BTC value over to the Ethereum ecosystem.

It's a way of selling BTC for other tokens, extracting and removing its value over time, and instead investing it into DeFi and similar.

Interesting! How are they wrapped? Do ppl trade bitcoin on ethereum without actually using the bitcoin blockchain?

They trade a token, sometimes called a stablecoin, that represent BTC as its underlying value.

Primarily two extremes for how this is done: Centralized, like WBTC (https://coinlist.co/help/what-is-wrapped-bitcoin-wbtc), and decentralized, like tBTC (https://defirate.com/tbtc/)

Besides the extremes, there's the pragmatic in the middle - interoperability in general. RenVM supports Bitcoin and many other coins on multiple hosts, not just Ethereum (eg. Polkadot):

https://renproject.io

https://mainnet.renproject.io

I'm not convinced RenVM is really in the middle in its current state. Currently the core team holds all of the keys for the over $300M in Bitcoin stored by their project [0]. I'd take wbtc, which is held by a consortium of well known custodians in the space over that any day.

[0] https://www.theblockcrypto.com/daily/76787/ren-bitcoin-walle...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com