When the introduction of WBTC, an ERC20 token backed 1:1 with Bitcoin had just been announced, I personally was excited that finally, the decentralised trading gap between Ether/ERC20 tokens and BTC had finally been bridged.
To my disappointment as I discovered later, the dream is far from reality and this project seems like a fail to me.
As you can see from the simple illustration,
1. One can easily carry out atomic swaps of ETH/WETH/ERC20 tokens using Kyber network and other partner merchants back and forth with much ease so long as the tokens are supported by the merchants
This is all done through a smart contract without much need to be registered on an exchange (decentralised trade is pretty easy) and the whole process is quite quick.
2. However, complications start on the
BTCTC/WBTC side.
- The only way you can acquire WBTC is through swapping it with ETH/WETH/ERC20 or buying it with fiat on kybernetwork... Decentralised atomic swap then loses meaning because apparently, one has to first pass KYC before being able to get WBTC.
- One can not swap BTC directly to WBTC and vice-versa. This means the bridge between BTC and ETH/ERC20 swaps is just a delusion.
In other words,
WBTC is a useless token because you can't swap it to back to BTC directly and also can't acquire it directly from BTC, thus I don't really see the point of this project if someone is trying to avoid the centralised exchanges.
What do you think about this
WBTC network thing folks?