How to move BTC to Ethereum and start earning yield.

5 min readOct 17, 2020

This is a complete guide how to receive tBTC and earn yield in decentralized way using the KEEP Network.

First of all, a few basic things. DeFi is in the spotlight right now, and it is not surprising at all. Earlier you can only Hodl your BTC, ETH and ERC20 tokens, but now you can do a bunch of different stuff and earn yield.

According to defipulse.com total value of funds locked in DeFi has grown during the year from almost nothing to 11B$ locked as for now (10/17/2020).

Despite being digital gold, BTC doesn’t have the biggest share in this pie, according to https://btconethereum.com/ it occupies 15% or 1,6B$ of total funds locked in decentralized ecosystem.

It is not accidental because moving BTC to Ethereum in decentralized way is not the easiest task, as I have described in my previous article tBTC. Game changer?. long story short, you can check this infographic from the article.

What is interestin is that 75% of all tokenized BTC is WBTC.

Well, having centralized BTC in decentralized finance is pretty strange, so today we are going from just holding your BTC to earning yield in decentralized way.

Obviously, I chose KEEP network for that purpose.

Moving to Ethereum.

You will need actually BTC and metamask wallet.

First of all, we have to mint tBTC (transfer from BTC to tBTC). tBTC is representation of BTC on Ethereum, fully backed by ETH.

tBTC is an open-source project supported by groups including Keep, Summa and the Cross-Chain Group. Moreover, it has strong community.

You can do this on tbtc.network. Click “start minting” and you will be transferred to https://dapp.tbtc.network/.

Then click “deposit”.

Connect your metamask wallet:

You will receive notification from metamask wallet where we have to choose which address we want to connect and use for receiving tBTC.

On the next step you will have to click “connect”.

Now you can choose the amount of BTC you want to move to Ethereum. I chose 0,01B just to show you how it works. And my humble advice to you — do the same, simply to check how everything work for the first time.

Then click “create address”.

And you will have to confirm contract interaction.

And 1 more, but this transaction will be way cheaper.

After waiting for a while you will receive your BTC address for depositing funds. Send the exact amount to provided address.

After this, wait for six confirmations.

Then you will see this message and, can you guess, confirm 2 more transaction in your metamask wallet.

Finally, we have our tBTC. Don’t forget to store your “TDT ID”, you will need it in future to redeem your BTC.

earning yield

What can we do now? Actually several things:

Trade on DEXes
Provide tBTC to Uniswap liquidity pool ETH/tBTC and earn fees.
Put them into WBTC/TBTC pool on SushiSwap.
Add liquidity to ETH/tBTC mooniswap pool.
Use Balancer to provide liquidity for WBTC/tBTC pool.
Create your own pool.
UPD 23/10. Now you can join the tBTC metapool on Curve!

Not much for now but it only has been launched recently. Keep Network have partnership with more than 40 industry-leading partners in DeFi sphere including Curve, Compound, Maker and Aave so more opportunities is coming. Check announcements in blog.

My choice will be to put my tBTC into mooniswap ETH/tBTC pool, not only to earn fees, but to actually use platform that may in future airdrop their token as it was with uniswap.

You can follow me.

Go to the https://mooniswap.exchange/#/swap , choose ETH/tBTC pair and click “pool” and “add liquidity”.

Now please choose the amount you want to put into pool and approve tBTC on mooniswap, you will receive notification from metamask wich you have to approve. On that screen your also can see your share of pool.

Now you are ready to become a liquidity provider, click “supply” and confirm in metamask.

Congratulations, now your own a share of ETH/tBTC liquidity pool on mooniswap.

See what we’ve done? Move BTC on the Ethereum blockchain and after that put it into liquidity pool to earn fees and all this in decentralized way. Incredible.
More opportunities to earn yield will be in future so that this article may be updated.

Do not forget that this is not a financial advice. tBTC dApp is in ALPHA and improper use may lead to LOSS OF FUNDS.

Additional resources:

How to move BTC to Ethereum and start earning yield.

Moving to Ethereum.

earning yield

Written by Grigorij First