Wrapped Bitcoin competitor, renBTC, has made massive gains over the past week as the project’s token’s price, and the total amount of Bitcoin tokenized using the protocol surges.
Ren is in second place behind Wrapped Bitcoin, or wBTC, which is currently the most popular method of tokenizing Bitcoin for use with DeFi protocols. According to btconethereum.com there is currently just over 29,000 wBTC on Ethereum, with renBTC accounting for around 9.5K currently, after topping 10K on August 17.
As DeFi continues to gain in popularity, more investors are looking to use their BTC holdings to access yield farming opportunities. In total 44,000 BTC — or more than half a billion dollars worth — now lives on the Ethereum network.
In less than a week, the total value locked (TVL) on the RenVM platform, which is a product of cross-chain liquidity provider Ren, surged more than 210% to hit a new high of $175 million according to Defipulse.com.
renVM’s native token, Ren, has also seen a parabolic increase in prices surging by 245% from $0.16 at the beginning of August to $0.55 on August 19.
Samson Mow takes aim
There are signs Bitcoin maximalists are growing increasingly uncomfortable with Ethereans bragging about the amount of tokenized Bitcoin on the network. On a recent podcast hosted by Peter McCormack featuring Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Blockstream CSO Samson Mow said tokenized Bitcoin only proved that Ethereans needed Bitcoin:
“The whole reason that Bitcoin is staying wrapped to be used on Ethereum is because it is stable and reliable. That’s why it seems to be Ethereans prefer using wrapped Bitcoin to Ether to do their DeFi stuff.”
Samson Mow’s argument was labeled a “blatant lie” in a YouTube response video released by Bankless. The Bankless hosts said that Bitcoin has exactly the same problems with scaling and high transaction fees when demand is high that Ethereum currently does and claimed the way Bitcoin “scales” at the moment is by being tokenized on Ethereum.
Like many ETH fans, they had a negative reaction to Mow’s attacks on the project and said they’d turned off the podcast in disgust.
