There have been reports of San Francisco based Coinlist now venturing into the Decentralized Finance Sphere. Since February this year, they have been directly involved with helping investors mainly financial firms with wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC) acquisitions.

The wBTC is an ERC token based on Ethereum that is backed by Bitcoin on 1:1 ration. This translates to for each wBTC in circulation there is an actual BTC in cold storage by Bitgo according to their forum. This may not be fully transparent but it has now put the BTC in a standard Ethereum form hence the BTC could now be used in Ethereum smart contracts.

The long process of converting Bitcoin to wBTC that involved first converting it to Ethereum was tedious and the tokens listing platform deciding to ease the burden at a small cost. They now offer their users the ability to convert BTC to wBTC and Vice versa at their own convenience straight from your wallet. Coinlist has revealed that they are responsible for minting up to 25% of the total wBTCs in circulation and a daily trading average of 20%. Their current rate for every transaction is 0.25%.

Notably, Coinlist founded in 2017 and backed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Polychain Capital made their name during the Initial Coin Offering era (ICO). They have reportedly held 12 ICOs since its launch including the $257 million Filecoin ICO the same year and more recent Dfinity sale of $102 million.

Their growth was however stunted as they suffered post ICO era. They have been involved in much smaller ICOs: $60 million Algorand and $72 million ICO for Nervos in 2019. The most recently held this year March for Solana Blockchain raising a meager $1.76 million.

They raised $10 million in a series funding backed by Jack Dorsey and VC Polychain Capital held last year in October.

247 +