pTokens, a project from Provable Things, has announced the arrival of pBTC on Kyber Network.
It's happening! 😉 #pbtc on @KyberNetwork pic.twitter.com/hUqNMUNjDA
— pNetwork 🦜 (@pNetworkDeFi) April 9, 2020
pTokens focuses on allowing the various cryptocurrencies and tokens to be tradable and usable even on blockchains where they are not native.
For example, bitcoin can be exchanged only on the Bitcoin blockchain, but thanks to an ERC20 token, called pBTC, they can be indirectly traded also on the Ethereum blockchain.
The pBTC tokens represent 1:1 the original BTC, but on the Ethereum blockchain, making bitcoin usable also on Ethereum-based DeFi platforms like Kyber Network.
As the transaction published by pTokens shows, about 0.988 pBTC were exchanged to and from the Kyber smart contract, with a fee of about 0.0065 ETH.
Kyber Network is a DeFi protocol dedicated to liquidity, which offers multiple types of pools, each of which exists as a smart contract controlled by its implementer.
It operates as a decentralized exchange, but without an order book: when a user starts a trade, the protocol returns the best price among all pools.
Moreover, Alice Corsini, COO of Provable Things, has pointed out that yesterday a whale has created 10 pBTC bringing the total supply to 17,628 pBTC, or over $100.000.
Whales are coming to $pBTC🐳 https://t.co/wwLBLE1IfE
— Alice Corsini (@alicecorsini_) April 9, 2020
Given that the pBTC smart contract was only published about a month ago, this single transaction has started to increase its total supply rapidly.
To date, 78 different addresses have been active on this smart contract, which generated 1,139 transactions, with a rather constant number of active users and transactions per day, and a significant increase in transaction volume over the last 3 days.
If so far bitcoin has not played the leading role in DeFi, as it has done for some time in the crypto markets, initiatives like this one, as well as WBTC, could allow it to carve out a key role also within the world of decentralized finance, for now dominated by Ethereum and DAI, with USDT in great growth.
After all, decentralized finance is nothing more than a decentralized crypto market, in contrast to centralized crypto markets such as the best-known exchanges in the industry, which means that it is highly unlikely that BTC will not end up playing a central role in this new area as well, which, however, is primarily based on the Ethereum blockchain.
Cross-chain interoperability is now starting to become a reality and this could ultimately benefit both Bitcoin and Ethereum itself.
