Blockstream has added six more than members to the federation that governs Liquid, the firm's Bitcoin sidechain for inter-exchange settlement network.

The half-dozen new Liquid Federation members include Bitcoin web wallet Coinos, crypto custodian Komainu, network privacy firm Nym, blockchain development company Vulpem Ventures, banker Watchdog Uppercase, and Liquid Network settlement platform Sideswap.

Liquid was announced at the end of 2015 as a Bitcoin sidechain designed to speed up Bitcoin transactions settlement for crypto exchanges. Liquid supports LBTC tokens that are pegged to Bitcoin. According to official data, there are currently 2,756 circulating LBTC, with the sidechain processing roughly 540 transactions each day.

The Liquid Federation now spans 59 members, including top cryptocurrency exchanges Bitfinex, OKEx, BitMEX, and Huobi, investment product provider CoinShares, and hardware wallet house Ledger. Despite the federation'southward expanding membership, Liquid'due south volume and TVL is dwarfed by tokenized Bitcoin on Ethereum — with the Q3 2020 DeFi smash driving significant demand for tokenized BTC.

According to btconethereum.com, there'south now more than 148,000 BTC tokenized on the Ethereum network, worth more $5 billion combined. As such, the value of Bitcoin on Liquid is equal to just ane.86% of the all Bitcoin tokenized on Ethereum.

With much of the supply of tokenized BTC on Ethereum being used by retail investors to access DeFi protocols, direct comparisons with LBTC may exist problematic due to the small pool of users and applications for Liquid tokens.

While Blockstream has touted its Lightning Network sidechain for fast peer-to-peer transactions, Lightning's adoption has as well been overshadowed by Ethereum-powered BTC tokens in contempo month.

Only 1,060 BTC been locked on the Lightning Network according to bitcoinvisiuals.com — equating to less than one-hundredth of the Bitcoin locked on Ethereum.

With Ethereum-powered BTC tokens representing 40 times the combined TVL of Blockstream'south two flagship sidechains, it appears much of the crypto community is opting to use the Ethereum network over Blockstream's centralized sidechains to meliorate the speed and scalability of BTC.

Three quarters of tokenized BTC on Ethereum is locked in the Wrapped Bitcoin protocol, followed by HBTC with 12% and renBTC with nigh nine%.