Crypto custodian BitGo plans to launch a dollar-backed stablecoin next year, offering rewards to liquidity providers.

BitGo is set to launch a dollar-backed stablecoin dubbed USDS in January 2025, positioning it as the first “open-participation stablecoin” in the market. In a Sept. 18 post on X, BitGo said the stablecoin is “fully backed by short-duration T-bills, overnight repos, and cash, ensuring high liquidity and low risk with real-time proof of reserves.”

BitGo aims to stand out by offering liquidity providers a share of the returns generated from its reserves, creating a new incentive model in a market currently dominated by Tether’s (USDT) and Circle’s USD Coin (USDC).

The move comes as BitGo, which holds a dominant 96.6% market share in the Wrapped Bitcoin market with its wBTC token, faces increasing competition from new entrants like Coinbase. On Sept. 12, Coinbase launched cbBTC, a new ERC20 token backed 1:1 by Bitcoin held in Coinbase’s custody. The token is available on the Base and Ethereum networks, signaling a direct challenge to BitGo’s market leadership.

In the meantime, some decentralized finance protocols are reevaluating their use of wBTC due to concerns over its affiliations with TRON founder Justin Sun. Sky, formerly known as MakerDAO, is now considering whether it should remove wBTC as collateral from its borrowing platform SparkLend due to BitGo’s impending partnership with BitGlobal, which is perceived as potentially shifting control of wBTC to a venture associated with Sun.

US crypto giant Coinbase has successfully gone live with the launch of its wrapped Bitcoin token at a $100 million market cap.

The firm’s Coinbase Wrapped BTC (cbBTC) is a Bitcoin (BTC)-backed, Ethereum (ETH)-based token that aims to help users streamline their decentralized finance (DeFi) experience.

Data from CoinGecko shows that cbBTC started trading on September 12th before getting to a market cap of over $100 million the next day.

Coinbase recently explained how BTC holders can use the firm’s wrapped version of the crypto king to streamline their DeFi experience.

“cbBTC removes a key point of friction by allowing customers to use Bitcoin they already hold in new ways on-chain. cbBTC is built to be seamlessly compatible with DeFi applications, so users can now tap into novel DeFi use cases like providing their Bitcoin as liquidity to DeFi protocols, or using it as collateral to borrow other crypto assets…

When Coinbase users send their BTC from Coinbase to an address on Base or Ethereum, that BTC will automatically be converted 1:1 to cbBTC. When users receive cbBTC in their Coinbase accounts, it will be converted 1:1 from cbBTC to BTC.”

Tron (TRX) founder Justin Sun criticized cbBTC, saying Coinbase’s new project was too centralized and based on trust.

“cbBTC lacks Proof of Reserve, no audits, and can freeze anyone’s balance anytime. Essentially, it’s just ‘trust me.’ Any US government subpoena could seize all your BTC. There’s no better representation of central bank Bitcoin than this. It’s a dark day for BTC.”

At time of writing, cbBTC is the 402nd-largest crypto with a market cap of over $97.66 million.

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Base Blockchain, the layer-2 network launched by Coinbase in 2023, is doing well as the ‘crypto winter’ continues.

Nansen data shows that the network’s number of users is growing and beating many blockchains like Avalanche (AVAX), Polygon (POL), and Cronos (CRO).

The number of active addresses jumped to a record high of over 1.964 million, up from the year-to-date low of 196,000. 

Another number reveals that the number of transactions handled by Base Blockchain has jumped to 4.8 million, up from January’s low of less than 300,000. 

Meanwhile, the number of daily deployments in the network rose to an all-time high of near 18,000 earlier this month.

In contrast, as we wrote this week, Avalanche’s number of active addresses and transactions have dropped by over 50% from the highest level this year. 

This growth happened as more developers embraced the network because of its strong speeds and low transaction costs. 

According to DeFi Llama, Base has 348 dApps in the decentralized finance industry and a total value locked of $1.57 billion, making it the sixth-biggest chain. The biggest DeFi dApps in its ecosystem are Aerodrome, Uniswap, Extra Finance, AAVE, and Morpho Blue. 

It is also the sixth-biggest in terms of stablecoins in the ecosystem, with over $1.57 billion. It will likely have more stablecoins when it is included in Tether’s network. 

Most importantly, Base Blockchain has also become the third-biggest chain in the decentralized exchange industry, where its dApps handled a volume of $3 billion in the last seven days. This made it bigger than Arbitrum, which processed $2.77 billion.

Developers and users love Base because of its low gas fees. According to Nansen, while its transactions have jumped, the amount of gas fees fell to $50,425, down from over $2.3 million in March. Base has made just $57 million in fees this year while Ethereum and Tron have made over $1 billion. 

The performance of Base is a good thing for Coinbase, which is losing market share to companies like Crypto.com, Huobi, and Bybit.

Coinbase handled crypto volume worth $66 billion while the others had volume of over $70 billion.