cirBTC Who? Circle Launches Wrapped Bitcoin Into the Already-Crowded Wrapper Wars

Circle, the stablecoin heavyweight behind USDC and EURC, just rolled into the Bitcoin sandbox with its own wrapped Bitcoin, apparently thinking the wrapper market needed more competition. Bold move for a company that's spent years printing stablecoins.

The new asset, going by the slightly awkward name cirBTC and unveiled Thursday, will live on Ethereum with the classic 1:1 bitcoin backing. Circle's got its sights set on the usual suspects: OTC desks, market makers, and lending protocols—basically anyone who's been eyeing DeFi from the sidelines like a crypto virgin at a maximalist convention.

Circle's pitching cirBTC as a "highly secure and neutral version of wrapped BTC" for financial institutions that have been tiptoeing into DeFi like nervous cats near a cucumber. Apparently, the pitch is: we're boring, we're safe, trust us.

Circle's entering an increasingly packed neighborhood. BitGo's Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) currently wears the crown with roughly $8 billion in market cap and 119,157 tokens floating around, though that's still down about 50% from its November 2021 glory days when BTC was mooning to cycle highs. Ah, simpler times.

Coinbase's cbBTC, which burst onto the scene in September 2024, holds second place at $5.9 billion with 88,800 tokens in supply. Because apparently every major crypto player woke up one day and said, "You know what DeFi needs? More wrapped Bitcoin."

Various exchanges have also joined the wrapper gold rush with their own concoctions: KBTC, GTBTC, BBTC, HBTC, and XBTC—because apparently, the crypto naming convention is just "pick a letter and add BTC." Their market caps remain a rounding error compared to the big two.

Together, wBTC and cbBTC are holding roughly 208,000 BTC in total supply, according to CoinGecko data. That's a lot of IOUs for a digital asset nobody actually wants to move.

Beyond Ethereum, cirBTC will also launch on Circle's layer-