Tokenized bitcoin supply has dropped significantly since the beginning of the year

Back in January, the number of wrapped bitcoins (WBTC) issued on the Ethereum blockchain was around 266,880 WBTC and since then, this number has dropped by more than 15% to 225,962 WBTC. Similarly, the amount of tokenized bitcoins minted on Binance’s Smart Chain (BSC) has also dropped significantly over the past 11 months.

The supply of bitcoins has decreased significantly over the past 11 months.

At the time of this writing, the next two largest bitcoin companies are the Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) and the BEP2 Bitcoin issued by BSC, also known as BTCB. However, the number of tokenized bitcoins from these two projects has decreased significantly since January.

For example, the number of BTCBs in circulation on Jan. 6, 2022 was about 105,121 BTCBs, according to archived statistics from coinmarketcap.com. In addition, bitcoin was trading at $42,738 per unit on that day, which means that BTCB’s market capitalization was about $4.49 billion.

Since that date, the price of BTC has shuddered and is still far from the $42,000 area. The number of BTCB in circulation has dropped 49.1 percent to 53,444 BTCB, according to coinmarketcap.com data recorded on Nov. 25.

At an exchange rate of about $16,504 on Nov. 25, the market capitalization of BTCB is about $882 million. Over the past 24 hours, BTCB has seen $3.25 million in aggregate trading volume on a large number of decentralized exchange platforms (dex). The dex applications with the most active BTCB exchanges include Pancakeswap V2, Biswap, Dodo, and Apeswap.

Wrapped bitcoin supply drops 8.72% in 30 days

The largest tokenized bitcoin project WBTC has far more tokens than BTCB in circulation. On November 25, 2022, data shows that the number of WBTC in circulation is about 225,962 WBTC and on January 14, 2022, it was 266,880 WBTC.

This means that during 2022, the supply of WBTC was reduced by more than 15%, as 40,918 tokens were removed from circulation. In addition, over the past 30 days, Dune Analytics data, published by 21shares Research, shows that the supply of WBTC has fallen by 8.72%.

Of course, the value of WBTC was much higher on January 14, as the WBTC market valuation was about $11.35 billion. Removing over 40,000 WBTC from the offering and coupling it with the overall market capitalization of WBTC on November 25 is much lower than it was at the beginning of the year.

Today, WBTC’s market valuation is approximately $3.66 billion nominal U.S. dollars and over the past 24 hours it has seen $346.90 million in trading volume. The most active exchanges on WBTC are Binance, Okx, Digifinex and Hitbtc.

Tokenized bitcoin supplies have followed the same path as stablecoin supplies this year, which have declined significantly in 2022. The data suggests that during the crypto winter, traders are exchanging their tokenized stablecoins for real U.S. dollars. With tokenized bitcoin projects like BTCB and WBTC, users trading these tokens are looking to get their real bitcoins back.