First Mover: Tron’s Play for WBTC Shows Competition to Relieve Ethereum Congestion
The latest example comes from CoinDesk’s Ian Allison, who reported Thursday that Tron, the three-year-old blockchain headed by Justin Sun (the crypto executive who paid $4.5 million to have a meal with Warren Buffett), has entered into a strategic alliance with custody specialist BitGo to accommodate wrapped bitcoin (WBTC) tokens. It’s become popular among users of the Ethereum blockchain partly because traders can deposit the tokens in various decentralized finance or “DeFi” applications to receive juicy interest rates.
Just Thursday, the cryptocurrency fund Three Arrows minted some 2,316 WBTC tokens, the largest-ever single issuance, for use on the Ethereum blockchain, Voell reported. The past few months’ explosion in DeFi, with the debut of automated trading platforms like Uniswap and copycat SushiSwap, has jammed the Ethereum network with congestion, driving up transaction fee rates and prompting rival blockchains to offer competing venues for developing new applications.
