[Research]: Comparison of wrapped BTC tokens

[djordon]

Research - Wrapped BTC tokens

This ticket holds the research relating to existing wrapper BTC tokens and further improvements we can make to our current approach. We've done some research on this subject already, but we should endeavor on a more comprehensive and in-depth analysis on the alternative wrapper BTC tokens available and the trade-offs that each of them have taken.

At the end we should have a quick summary of each of the alternative approaches taken (their security, level of decentralization, peg-in and peg-out guarantees, and so on).

A non-comprehensive list of wrapped BTC tokens includes:

• L-BTC on Liquid Network.
• rBTC on Rootstock.
• wBTC on Ethereum.
• tBTC on Ethereum. Whitepaper, which I could not find on the site, but found this overview.
• yBTC on Stellar.
• xBTC on Stacks.
• aBTC on Stacks.
• nBTC on Cosmos via the Nomic bridge. Looks like their documentation is this gist.
• mBTC on the mirror stacking protocol.
• BTC on Lightning Network. This is not a wrapped BTC token but there is much to learn about the approach.

1. Summary

2. Context & Relevance

3. Research

3.1 Proposed Research Conclusions

3.2 External Resources

3.3 Areas of Ambiguity

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Closing Checklist

• [ ] The takeaway from this issue is clearly documented in the description of this ticket.
• [ ] Everyone necessary has reviewed the resolution and agrees with the takeaways.
• [ ] This ticket has or links all the information necessary to familiarize a contributor with the topic and how it was resolved.

[djordon]

There is a draft notion doc for this. While it's in draft form it's only available upon request (I'll usually just grant it though).