Coinbase announces plan to bring cbBTC to Solana network

Crypto exchange Coinbase is planning to bring its cbBTC token onto Solana blockchain, the company’s Singapore head said at Saturday’s Solana Breakpoint 2024 event held in Singapore.

"We recently launched cbBTC on Base, but our users love Solana, and so do we," Coinbase’s Country Director of Singapore Hassan Ahmed said during a panel discussion at Breakpoint. However, Ahmed did not give a detailed timeline of when cbBTC will be made available on Solana.

The centralized digital asset exchange launched its version of wrapped bitcoin last week, after having teased the token in August. Upon launch, cbBTC was rolled out on Ethereum and Base networks.

The ERC-20 token, supported 1:1 by bitcoin that Coinbase holds, is aimed for users wanting to provide bitcoin liquidity to DeFi protocols in Ethereum and Base ecosystems, or for users wanting to use it as collateral for other assets. The company announced the token after a change in the ownership of the competitor token WBTC . 

At launch, Coinbase said it was working to expand the support for cbBTC to additional blockchain networks. The Coinbase wrapped Bitcoin currently holds around $137 million in market capitalization, according to data from CoinGecko.

In response to The Block's request for further information on the estimated launch date, Ahmed commented, "We are working on it and will announce once live."

Coinbase on Firedancer

Meanwhile, speaking on the topic of the roles of institutions in Web3, Ahmed said that Jump Crypto’s work with the Firedancer validator client on Solana is the "most impressive" display of institutions helping with diversification in blockchain.

"Client diversity is one of the core components of the Nakamoto coefficient," said Ahmed. "So once Frankendancer and Firedancer are live, this is a huge upgrade on Solana’s network decentralization."

On Friday, Jump Crypto’s chief science officer Kevin Bowers announced at Breakpoint that the Frankendancer validator client, a prototype of the much-anticipated Firedancer, launched on Solana mainnet, and that Firedancer is running on testnet.

Frankendancer, and later Firedancer, is designed to support Solana alongside the Agave validator client in a dual system for better efficiency.

Liam Heeger, blockchain engineer for Firedancer, provided additional details today at Breakpoint that the full non-voting, non-block producing Firedancer validator client has been live on-and-off for the around two months, but said it is not yet ready for general use and production.