We just announced the launch of 21.co Wrapped Tokens, which allows anyone to create wrappers for popular assets on Ethereum. 21.co uses a unique process to facilitate minting and burning to support the most complex centralized and decentralized systems.
21.co Wrapped Tokens create tokenized representations of assets on the Ethereum network, including SOL, BNB, XRP, ADA, and DOT, among others, with the ability to expand to other tokens and networks (including non-Ethereum networks).
Ethereum’s One-way Liquidity
While it’s easy to find liquidity for ETH on other chains, it can be more challenging to bridge other tokens to Ethereum. For example, the total supply of Wrapped AVAX on Ethereum is worth a little over $40,000. WMATIC comes out at just over $75,000, while BNB is at a little over $1.2M—despite starting as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum (the original token has been largely abandoned). Creating a native onchain index or liquidity pool on Ethereum requires greater supply.
Thus, onchain holding strategies are limited as they typically require transactions to be fully smart contract-based, making cross-chain interactions tougher to implement.
Without more liquidity on outside tokens, it’s largely impossible to include them in onchain holdings. Meanwhile, according to Delphi Digital, directly holding the network token has been historically the preferred option for allocating to the chain’s overall activity.
Today, the multi-chain narrative reached a dominating position. Even the Ethereum community has partially moved to layer-2 blockchains, which have launched their own tokens including OP and ARB. Unfortunately, they aren’t available on mainnet Ethereum.
How 21.co Wrapped Tokens Work
21.co Wrapped Tokens are available onchain as ERC-20 tokens and include a role-based functionality to handle minting and burning permissions.
The key to Wrapped Tokens lies in the minting and burning process, powered by Onyx, our proprietary operating system. A strong process is essential as any deviation from the token’s true underlying value offers the chance for arbitrage. Acting as the dashboard to enable minting and burning, Onyx has been used to create and redeem over $3.3 billion in TradFi assets, making it the perfect choice for 21.co Wrapped Tokens.
When minting, requests are initiated via Onyx. The underlying tokens are then sent to one of our institutional custodians. All assets can only be accessed through a shared multi-party computation (MPC) based key management system.
Once the assets have been received, 21.co mints the corresponding Wrapped Tokens to one of the institution’s whitelisted addresses.
The burn process is the reverse of minting: the user sends the Wrapped Tokens to 21.co, for burning. 21.co then requests a transfer from the custodian to the user’s approved address. The mint and burn process is subject to 21.co’s Terms of Use.
21.co Wrapped Tokens Offer Security at Scale
As a central security measure for creation and redemption, all minted and burned assets are approved offchain through a multi-step process. This includes a “maker-checker” process for transaction approvals and shard signing between the custodian and 21.co. This increases the difficulty to off-board tokens, even if one or more entities were to be compromised.
Leveraging 21.co's network of institutional and custody partners, we can swiftly transform any asset with sufficient liquidity into a Wrapped Token on any EVM-compatible chain.
Acting as the bridge between DeFi and CeFi, 21.co Wrapped Tokens can support a wide range of cross-chain use cases that aren’t served well by generalized bridges. Notably, this includes single-blockchain allocations, bringing non-EVM assets to Ethereum (or any other EVM chain), and many more uses that need to take advantage of the existing DeFi infrastructure.
