Tokenized BTC sits in an awkward position in 2026. The largest wrapped, custodial, and restaked BTC tokens add up to roughly $18B, while Bitcoin's own market cap is about $1.53 trillion at a $76,200 spot price, per CoinGecko on 2026-09-16. That puts barely over 1 percent of BTC onchain in a form that can touch lending, market making, or settlement rails. Circle's cirBTC aims squarely at that gap.
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This article maps the current tokenized BTC supply by issuer, traces the growth trajectory, and frames why the launch of cirBTC, Aave V4's BTC strategy, and the broader BTCfi push could pull a much larger share of BTC onchain over the next 18 months.
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Across the largest wrapped, custodial, and restaked BTC tokens, total tokenized BTC supply is roughly $18B on 2026-09-16. WBTC remains the largest at $8.8B per DeFiLlama, with cbBTC a clear second at $7.5B per CoinGecko. Everything else is an order of magnitude smaller. The combined supply is a little over 1 percent of BTC's market cap.
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The headline ratio matters more than any single token. BTC's market cap of about $1,529.7B per CoinGecko against a tokenized supply near $18B means roughly 99 percent of all Bitcoin still sits on Bitcoin Layer 1 wallets, exchange omnibus accounts, or cold storage. That ratio, not any one wrapper's league position, is the whole opportunity.
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Here is the wrapped BTC market broken down by the eight variants that matter for institutional and DeFi flows. Supplies were read on 2026-09-16 from DeFiLlama, CoinGecko for cbBTC, and Circle for cirBTC, which publishes its supply and BTC reserve addresses onchain.

The table makes two things obvious. First, WBTC no longer dominates: cbBTC is within striking distance of it. Second, the restaked and threshold-secured cohort is small next to both.
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WBTC's relative share slipped after BitGo moved WBTC into a joint venture with Hong Kong-based BiT Global in 2024, diversifying custody across Hong Kong and Singapore in what BitGo's August 2024 announcement describes as a strategic partnership with Justin Sun and the Tron ecosystem. That change drove a governance reaction across DeFi lenders, and cbBTC arrived at the same time as a Coinbase-issued alternative with cleaner US institutional optics. WBTC remains the deepest-liquidity wrapped BTC.
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BitGo's own announcement framed the move as an upgrade, diversifying the jurisdictions holding the underlying Bitcoin, which had previously been held entirely in the United States. It did not reverse the migration of new mints toward cbBTC. Most existing WBTC liquidity sits in Curve and Uniswap pools that are sticky for arbitrage reasons rather than ideological loyalty to BitGo.
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cbBTC is Coinbase's 1:1 wrapped BTC backed by Coinbase Custody reserves. Per CoinGecko it stood at $7.5B across 99,151 cbBTC on 2026-09-16, which makes it the clear number two and close behind WBTC.
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The cbBTC curve is the cleanest precedent for what cirBTC's trajectory could look like. A regulated issuer with deep exchange and custody infrastructure, launched into a market hungry for non-WBTC options, reached billions in supply without aggressive yield incentives.
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FBTC sits at $0.64B and tBTC, the Threshold Network's threshold-cryptography wrapped BTC, at $0.33B, both per DeFiLlama on 2026-09-16. tBTC serves the segment that prioritises minimal custodian trust over institutional optics. Neither is close to the two leaders.
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Lombard's LBTC at $0.78B and Ether.fi's eBTC at $0.02B are the BTCfi-native cohort, leaning on Babylon's staked BTC architecture rather than custodial reserves (supply per DeFiLlama and CoinGecko, 2026-09-16). Their demand comes from Bitcoin restaking yield, not lending collateral. Treating them as the same category as WBTC misses the mechanic.
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The clearest near-term catalyst is cirBTC itself. Per Circle it is now live on Arc and Ethereum, backed 1:1 by BTC with reserve addresses published onchain, and Circle pairs it with Digital Asset-Backed Borrowing for eligible Circle Mint customers: deposit BTC, mint cirBTC, post it as collateral on pre-approved lending markets and receive USDC in the Mint account. That is a mint-to-liquidity path no other wrapper currently offers.
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Any number put on 2027 supply here would be a guess rather than a projection from a published model, so this piece does not put one. What is worth watching instead is the mix: whether new supply arrives through institutional mint windows like Circle Mint or through DeFi farming incentives, because the two imply very different stickiness.
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Total stablecoin market cap was $304.4B on 2026-09-15 and the three largest tokenized Treasury wrappers, BUIDL at $2.7B, USYC at $2.6B and USDY at $2.2B, came to about $7.5B, both per DeFiLlama. Tokenized BTC near $18B is larger than that wrapper set but a fraction of stablecoins. The comparison matters because the same institutional buyers driving BUIDL and USYC are the natural buyers for cirBTC.
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The penetration gap is the whole thesis. Tokenized BTC is barely over 1 percent of BTC's market cap, while stablecoins are already the default onchain dollar.
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cirBTC is Circle's 1:1 native BTC-backed wrapped Bitcoin, now live on Arc and Ethereum with reserves independently verifiable onchain, per Circle. Circle's own reserve page showed total supply of 279.05 cirBTC, about $21.1M, against 281.56 BTC of reserves as of September 15 2026. It is issued by Circle International Bermuda Limited, a Class F Digital Asset Business regulated by the Bermuda Monetary Authority, and is aimed at eligible institutional participants including OTC desks, market makers and DeFi protocols.
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The strategic read is that Circle is bundling cirBTC into the same institutional surface as USDC, EURC, and Circle Mint. Treasuries that already mint USDC at par through Circle Mint can plausibly mint cirBTC through the same workflow. Circle states the design goal directly: cirBTC integrates with USDC and Circle Mint as a single Circle-native stack. Whether that converts into share is still unproven at $21M of supply.
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The biggest risks are regulatory rather than technical. Wrapped BTC has avoided direct US securities scrutiny so far, but any classification of wrapped BTC as a security or a regulated commodity derivative would slow institutional issuance. Custody concentration is a second risk: WBTC's 2024 episode showed how quickly DeFi collateral can rotate when custodian trust shifts.
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A third risk is BTCfi competition. If Babylon-secured staked BTC variants like LBTC and eBTC compound faster than custodial wrappers, the share captured by cirBTC, cbBTC, and FBTC could be smaller than the cbBTC precedent implies.
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Every figure here was read on 2026-09-16 from the page that states it. WBTC, FBTC, LBTC and tBTC supply from DeFiLlama. cbBTC supply and unit count from CoinGecko. BTC price and market cap from CoinGecko. cirBTC supply, reserves, network availability and issuing entity from Circle, which reports as of September 15 2026. WBTC custody history from BitGo's August 2024 announcement. Stablecoin and tokenized-Treasury figures from DeFiLlama as of 2026-09-15.
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All percentages are rounded. No supply figure appears here unless a linked page states it, and no 2027 supply estimate is given because no published model supports one.
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