Today, 21.co, the parent company of 21Shares, one of the world’s largest issuers of crypto exchange-traded products (ETPs), announced its integration of Chainlink Proof of Reserve (PoR) on the Solana and Ethereum mainnets to enhance the transparency of 21.co Wrapped Bitcoin (21BTC).
PoR leverages Chainlink’s oracle infrastructure to provide real-time updates for reserves backing digital assets with superior transparency and reliability compared to annual statutory audits, interim audits, and monthly proof of reserves. As such, PoR establishes a new standard for digital assets, decentralized exchanges, and crypto ETFs including the ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF (ARKB) and the 21Shares Core Ethereum ETF (CETH).
21.co launched 21BTC on Solana in May and expanded to Ethereum earlier this month. Built by institutions for the digital asset community, 21BTC is fully backed 1:1 by Bitcoin reserves held in cold storage and institutional custody. 21.co’s digital asset management platform, Onyx, will utilize PoR to automate real-time reserve verification and enable secure minting of 21BTC.
By boosting user confidence that 21BTC is fully collateralized, PoR will ultimately help make Bitcoin – the oldest and largest digital asset by market cap – more easily and securely accessible throughout the Solana and Ethereum ecosystems.
As the industry-standard decentralized computing platform, Chainlink has enabled more than $15 trillion in transaction value while providing a comprehensive set of services, including PoR, that are critical for creating and securing digital assets and scaling onchain finance to billions of global users.
In an official announcement, Eliezer Ndinga, Head of Strategy and Business Development, Digital Assets at 21.co, underscored Chainlink’s essential role in supporting 21BTC’s adoption across Solana and Ethereum as 21.co’s preferred service for bringing reserve data onchain.
“By securing the minting function and providing timely and reliable monitoring of reserves, Proof of Reserve gives users greater assurances that 21BTC is fully backed by BTC 1:1,” he said.
“21.co and Chainlink have played fundamentally important roles in ensuring the adoption of a more secure blockchain infrastructure, and we’re excited to see 21.co integrate Chainlink Proof of Reserve to support 21BTC,” added Chainlink Labs Chief Business Officer Johann Eid.
“Proof of Reserve’s role in enabling a secure minting function is a key step to creating a reliable framework that allows for the tokenization of trillions of dollars in value.”