Bitgo Officially Launches Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) on Kava

TLDR: Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) is offered by Bitgo Trust Company and is the worlds largest and most used wrapped BTC asset. Today Kava is thrilled to announce that Kava Chain is one of a handful of Layer 1 networks that Bitgo has partnered with to deploy native WBTC. This is a huge win for the Kava ecosystem and generates significant native BTC liquidity within Kava ecosystem projects.

Kava Chain now joins Ethereum and Tron as one of three elite Layer 1s that have both a native USDT and WBTC integration. After Tether chose Kava to deploy native USDT Bitgo has partnered with Kava to deploy WBTC. Binance, the world’s largest exchange, then launched native support for Kava EVM including direct integration with USDT and shortly WBTC. With other major integrations with partners like Stargate, Fireblocks, Coinbase and many more Kava now has one of the most advanced infrastructures for liquidity in the world. 

The value of both native USDT and WBTC on Kava, coupled with the integrations from all of the largest crypto partners, is responsible for the recent massive growth of adoption and liquidity on the Kava ecosystem. Large industry players and retail users are now able to make and participate in markets on Kava in native assets which can then be arbitraged between Binance and Ethereum markets directly. This combined with Kava’s ability to bridge seamlessly to the Cosmos ecosystem brings an unprecedented advantage in terms of capital efficiency and safety of transport between different venues. 

BitGo Won The Native Wrapped Bitcoin Race

Dozens of wrapped BTC products became available over the past few years and BitGo emerged as the by-far dominant offering in terms of liquidity and adoption amongst Defi and CEX venues for liquidity. Bitgo plays a crucial role in the native WBTC integration on Kava as it is the custodial agent backing the WBTC natively issued on Kava and insured by a $250 million insurance policy. BitGo ensures high standards of security and rigorous compliance mixed with the industry's leading liquidity partners to onboard the highest quality wrapped BTC product onto Kava.

Through BitGo’s strict adherence to ERC-20 standards and reputation as a trusted custodian it brings an added layer of security and reliability to the integration of WBTC. The WBTC that BitGo secures is fully backed by the Bitcoin it represents and is reserved on a 1-to-1 level.

Kava Chain Won The Native Liquidity Infrastructure Race

The value of Kava winning native integrations with the two largest digital asset providers in the world, Tether for USDT, and Bitgo for WBTC cannot be stressed enough. The complexity and long standing nature of these partnerships is reflected in the fact that only Kava, Ethereum and Tron have been able to secure these direct relationships with two of the titans of liquidity in this industry. Further, integrating these native Kava assets into the largest distribution partners in crypto (Binance, Fireblocks, Stargate, Coinbase, etc) ensures Kava has an infrastructure advantage that it can leverage to continue growing adoption in a wide variety of uses cases with the crypto ecosystem’s best projects. 

All of Kava’s ecosystem projects now have access to native WBTC which provides easy entry points for seasoned and new users into the Kava ecosystem. The ease of access to WBTC on Kava Chain allows for unmatched liquidity and fresh utility of the projects already offered within Kava’s ecosystem.

Kava is now a super-highway of liquidity with native integrations to the world's largest assets. Over $100B in USDT and $10B in WBTC are able to flow freely into Kava ecosystem through the world's largest partners which is an infrastructural moat that Kava will be able to leverage for years to come.