Coinbase’s Cryptic ‘cbBTC’ Post Sparks Speculation of New Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) Alternative on Base

A cryptic post from Coinbase's X account triggered speculation that the exchange was working on a new alternative to Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC).

Coinbase appeared to tease a new alternative to Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) with a cryptic post on Tuesday.

“cbBTC,” wrote Coinbase in a post on X, which it followed up with “Coming soon” a few hours later.

The exchange’s layer 2 network Base also chimed in on the post with a comment from its X account that read “based.”

This led to further speculation that Coinbase plans to roll out its own version of WBTC on Base, a claim that was all but confirmed by the layer 2 network’s creator shortly after.

“to say it out loud: I love bitcoin, am so grateful for it’s role kickstarting crypto, and we’re going to build a massive bitcoin economy on base,” wrote Pollak on X.

If launched, cbBTC on Base would likely come with benefits of lower fees to mint and redeem tokens, and drive increased usage of wrapped Bitcoin tokens by drawing in more users that trust the Coinbase brand.

A potential alternative to WBTC comes at a particularly interesting time, given the recent controversy around one of WBTC’s primary custodians BitGo, and its plans to move custody out of the U.S. and into Hong Kong and Singapore.

There is around 154,000 WBTC on Ethereum, valued at over $9 billion at the time of writing. Major DeFi lending protocols like MakerDAO and Aave have a significant amount of WBTC as collateral, and have already begun discussing the next steps in light of the custody changes.

MakerDAO’s risk management unit BA Labs proposed offboarding WBTC, while Aave’s risk unit Chaos Labs seems to be leaning towards a more wait-and-see type of approach.

“This week may mark the turning point when BitGo went from being the market dominant BTC derivative, with a $9.3 billion market cap, securing several billion in loans across DeFi, to a very rapid decline,” said Moonwell founding contributor and DeFi contributor Luke Youngblood.

“We don’t know when cbBTC will launch, but BitGo fumbling the ball and losing the entire tokenized Bitcoin market in a very short period of time was not something anyone predicted a week ago.”