WETH (WETH) : cours, graphique et analyse

WETH is the least glamorous asset in the top 100 and one of the most used. It exists because of a historical quirk: ether predates the ERC-20 token standard that Ethereum itself popularised, so ETH does not behave like the tokens built on top of it. WETH papers over that.

How it works

Send ether to the WETH contract and it holds the ether and issues you an equal number of WETH. Send WETH back and it burns the tokens and returns the ether. The contract does nothing else — no fees, no governance, no yield — and it has been running essentially unchanged since 2017. The rate is fixed at one to one by the contract’s own logic, not by a market, which is why WETH does not have a price of its own in any meaningful sense.

Supply

Supply is exactly the amount of ether currently locked in the contract. It rises and falls throughout the day as traders wrap and unwrap, and it carries no issuance policy whatsoever.

What to watch

Honestly, very little. The contract is simple, immutable and among the most scrutinised pieces of code in the ecosystem. The figure worth glancing at is total WETH outstanding, which is a rough proxy for how much ether is being actively used in decentralised finance rather than merely held.

Where it is used

Almost everywhere. Decentralised exchanges quote pairs against WETH, lending markets accept it, and most contracts that need to handle « ether » as a token handle WETH instead. Many interfaces wrap and unwrap automatically in the background, which is why plenty of people have used it without noticing.

The risk here is narrow and mostly not about the contract. WETH’s price risk is simply ether’s price risk. What people get wrong is treating a market quote for WETH as independent information: it is not, and any lasting deviation from the price of ether would be an arbitrage opportunity rather than a signal. The residual risk is smart-contract risk in whatever protocol you deposit it into, which is usually far larger than any risk in WETH itself.