Many are interested in having their BTC on the Ethereum network for various reasons: it provides exposure to BTC while participating in DeFi, it’s easier to manage alongside other ERC20-based assets at the wallet level, and so forth. However, WBTC, a popular choice, is a centralized option minted and custodied by BitGo. Are there any decentralized alternatives?

renBTC

RenBTC, once a promising contender, now seems to be out of the race. After FTX’s collapse, the team found itself without funding to continue operations—a rather ironic outcome for what was supposed to be a “decentralized” solution.

sBTC

sBTC is an intriguing option. Instead of being backed by real BTC, it’s backed by the Synthetix trading platform using a price oracle. Holding sBTC essentially means you are long on BTC, with Synthetix stakers taking the short position as “their debt”. The good news is that it’s stable. However, the downside is that other than price exposure, there aren’t many opportunities for lending or yield farming with it.

tBTC

tBTC seems to be the next promising option. It’s the successor to the previous version of tBTC developed by the Keep project, which later merged with NuCypher to create a new project called Threshold network.

They recently launched their tBTC on the mainnet, with around 530 BTC currently minted. To mint tBTC, you can use their bridge. However, there is currently no option to “unmint” (the team has indicated it will take 3~6 months to enable this feature).

Conclusion

Despite progress, it’s clear that we still have some way to go until we have a truly decentralized Bitcoin on the Ethereum network. It’s a complex challenge that will require innovative solutions and robust execution.