Bitcoin Is Worth Over $1 Trillion. How Much Will Coinbase’s New cbBTC Grab? - Ep. 703
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There is so much Bitcoin. There's so much value tied up in that Bitcoin and the the power of this latent user demand being able to be sort of unleashed in this way very directly onto on chain applications, we think is going to, lead to a ton of innovation, and that that is ultimately great for Coinbase.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hate resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, author of the Cryptopians. I started coming crypto 9 years ago and as a senior editor at Forbes was the 1st Dmitry Meter Boarder to cover cryptocurrency full time. This is the September 13, 2024 episode of Unchained. Today's episode is brought to you by Gemini, a US based crypto exchange built for new and advanced traders. Gemini is offering new customers $15 in BTC when they trade. Sign up today to earn your Bitcoin. Where can you find $700,000,000 in real world assets, 11,000,000 daily
so much for having me.
We're recording Thursday, which is the day that Coinbase has launched its version of wrapped Bitcoin called CB BTC. Can you tell us what CB BTC is and what you expect people will use it for?
Absolutely. So CB BTC is a new product from Coinbase that is attempting to add utility to Bitcoin, to the Bitcoin that people are already holding on Coinbase by allowing our users to wrap that Bitcoin and send it on chain onto the base network or onto the Ethereum L one as a wrapped asset that is backed 1 to 1 with Bitcoin that Coinbase holds on platform In terms of what we expect people to use it for everything that exists in Defi today and a 100 things that we can't yet imagine. So this is borrowing and lending protocols, money markets, minting stable coins, perhaps dexes, all the things tha
why did Coinbase decide to launch CBBC? Yep.
So Bitcoin is the granddaddy of all crypto assets. I think Bitcoin dominance right now in terms of the whole overall crypto market cap is somewhere over 50%, and a lot of that Bitcoin is held by Coinbase users, both our retail users and our institutional users. Something like a $137,000,000,000 worth of Bitcoin, in our last public 10 q filing held on platform. And for a lot of that Bitcoin sitting in Coinbase, behind our security, our best practices, and letting people hold that Bitcoin safely, that is already serving its highest and best use. And for the many people and then a lot of Bitcoin
been different setups for types of wrapped Bitcoin with varying degrees of decentralization. So for instance, the most well known version of wrapped Bitcoin is wBTC in which crypto custody company Bitco custodies the Bitcoin as a centralized custodian. And you've kind of, I think given a hint as to how c bbtc will be set up. But could you describe when a user goes to mint CB BTC, what happens in the background?
Yeah, absolutely. So let's say you're a user on Coinbase today and you hold 1 BTC to keep things simple. You'd go to your Coinbase account and say, I wanna send that Bitcoin. And when you go to send that Bitcoin, you'll have a choice now. You can say, I wanna send it on the Bitcoin network, and that will send it as it always has. You can say, I wanna send it on the lightning network, which is support that we added in Coinbase, at the beginning of this year, and that will do a lightning send for faster and a faster send and cheaper fees of that Bitcoin. Or now you could also say, I'd like to se
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