Circle’s cirBTC surpasses 5,000 issued tokens

Circle launched cirBTC on June 8, 2026, and the market apparently liked what it saw. The 1:1 Bitcoin-backed token has now crossed the 5,000-token milestone, a number that looks modest until you consider it was sitting at roughly 40 tokens in mid-August. The product is Circle’s formal entry into the wrapped Bitcoin market, a corner of DeFi where your Bitcoin gets tokenized so it can participate in lending, borrowing, and other on-chain strategies without you ever having to sell it. What cirBTC actually is cirBTC, formally called Circle Wrapped Bitcoin, is a token where each unit is backed by one native Bitcoin held in custody by Circle National Trust, a federally chartered trust bank. The custody arrangement matters: Circle is not relying on a third-party custodian with ambiguous oversight, but rather an entity with a federal charter, which carries meaningful regulatory weight for institutional buyers. Transparency is baked in through Chainlink Proof of Reserve, which provides real-time on-chain verification of the backing. Around September 24, 2026, the circulating supply stood at approximately 4,300.68 tokens, while total reserves sat at roughly 4,448.19 BTC. The excess reserve cu...