If you want to move WBTC across chains, start with the market you want to use, then use RenBridge to move BTC or WBTC to the chain where that market actually lives. The bridge is the transfer tool; the yield comes later, from the DeFi protocol you choose after the asset lands.
Here is the short version: check the live lending or liquidity market first, verify the exact WBTC contract on the source and destination chains, bridge only through the route you mean to use, then supply the received WBTC into the destination protocol. For Aave, that means supplying WBTC to a lending pool and receiving an interest-bearing aToken such as aWBTC or, on Aave v3 Ethereum, aEthWBTC. It is lending. It is not restaking.
This guide focuses on the practical decision: where should your WBTC be before you try to earn yield?
You are not just moving a ticker from one wallet screen to another. You are moving exposure into a different execution environment: different gas token, different token contract, different liquidity, different DeFi markets, and different risks.
The clean workflow is:
That order matters. If you bridge first and research later, you may end up with WBTC on a chain where the yield is lower, the market is capped, liquidity is thin, or you do not have enough gas to exit.
WBTC, or Wrapped Bitcoin, is Bitcoin represented as a token that can be used in smart-contract ecosystems. The WBTC official site describes WBTC as backed 1:1 by Bitcoin reserves and built to bring BTC liquidity into DeFi. In practice, that means native BTC is held by a custodian framework, with BitGo as a core custodian, while WBTC circulates as a token users can move, trade, lend, and use as collateral.
That is different from native BTC. Native BTC lives on the Bitcoin network. WBTC is a wrapped representation designed for chains such as Ethereum and other EVM environments.
It is also important to separate Ethereum WBTC from bridged WBTC on another chain. WBTC on Ethereum is the ERC-20 token most DeFi users think of first. WBTC on Polygon is a bridged representation with a different contract. Polygon's mapped token documentation lists PoS-WBTC with Ethereum WBTC as the parent token and a separate Polygon child-chain address. Same ticker, different contract.
As of this writing, the commonly referenced Ethereum WBTC contract is 0x2260fac5e5542a773aa44fbcfedf7c193bc2c599, and Polygon's mapped WBTC contract is commonly listed as 0x1BFD67037B42Cf73acF2047067bd4F2C47D9BfD6. Do not treat those as a substitute for your own verification. Before signing, compare the contract shown in your wallet, bridge, and destination app against official docs and a block explorer such as the CoinGecko WBTC reference, Etherscan, or PolygonScan.