Devs mint Bitcoin on the Cardano network: cBTC

Cardano blockchain achieved a new milestone with a fully decentralised wrapped Bitcoin minting protocol.

Bitcoin (BTC) is based on traditional Proof-of-work (PoW) without any smart contract system. In short, devs can’t develop DApps or any kind of Defi protocol on the Bitcoin network directly. The network fee in the Bitcoin network is very high over the top leading Proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus-based crypto networks like Polkadot, Cardano, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), etc. But minting BTC supply on other efficient & smart contract-enabled networks allow people to access Bitcoin with several features. 

On 5 March 2023,  AnetaBTC announced the successful minting of cBTC, a wrapped Bitcoin form on the Cardano network, marking a major step forward for the Cardano Defi ecosystem.

In the present time, wrapped Bitcoin is mainly available on the Ethereum (wBTC) & Binance network (BTC-B). Both of these two wrapped forms of Bitcoin are best at their level but with their unique problems.

Wrapped Bitcoin on the Ethereum network is not much better because network fee on the Ethereum blockchain is very high, on the other hand, wrapped Bitcoin on the BSC network is a centralised system, managed by a dedicated BSC network team manually. 

A crypto Twitter user noted that Cardano network devs supporters did the same thing with a fully decentralised approach without any involvement of centralised custodians.

Wrapped BTC (wBTC)

The concept of wBTC was first introduced in late 2018 and launched by a collaborative effort by BitGo, Kyber Network, and Ren (previously Republic Protocol). Later some other community participants supported wBTC conct & increased Bitcoin liquidity. 

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