Bitcoin is worth about $1.25 trillion. Almost none of it gets put to work.
Circle wants to change that. The firm known for digital dollars now wants a slice of bitcoin.
Circle makes USDC, the second-largest stablecoin. A stablecoin is a crypto coin tied to the dollar.
This week it launched a new token called cirBTC. The token runs on Ethereum.
Each cirBTC is backed 1-to-1 by real bitcoin. You lock up one coin and get one token you can use.
Use it for what? For DeFi.
DeFi is short for decentralized finance. These are apps that let you lend, borrow, and trade crypto with no bank in the way.
On those apps, people can earn interest or swap coins. Bitcoin owners have long wanted a way to do that.
cirBTC can be used across many of these apps. That covers lending pools, trading venues, and tokenized assets.
The big draw is yield. Holders could earn a return on their bitcoin without selling a single coin.
Here is the snag with plain bitcoin. It was not built to run those apps.
So most people just hold it and watch the price. A wrapped token fixes that.
It works like a passport for your coins. It lets bitcoin move and work on a new network.
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Circle is not first to the idea. Wrapped bitcoin, or wBTC, launched on Ethereum in 2019.
It still leads the pack at about $7.3 billion. Coinbase came next with cbBTC in 2024.
That token now sits near $5.4 billion. It is the one Circle wants to beat.
Circle's whole pitch is trust. Big investors already know its name.
That name comes from the stablecoin world, where USDC holds more than $75 billion. Circle hopes that trust carries over to bitcoin.
Circle is a public company, traded as CRCL. That status gives it even more pull with big funds.
If it does, those firms will pick cirBTC. That would pit Circle against Coinbase and BitGo.
BitGo is the firm that guards the coins behind wBTC. The target buyer is the big firm, not the day trader.
Every wrapped coin comes with a trade-off. You have to trust the issuer really holds the bitcoin.
That is why a brand name matters so much here. Circle is leaning on its track record to earn it.
The prize is smaller than it sounds. All wrapped bitcoin is worth only about $13 billion.
That is a sliver next to bitcoin's $1.25 trillion. Circle is betting that sliver grows fast.
It wants its token to be the top pick when it does. For now, three big names chase the same small pie.
The race just gained one more runner.
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