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pBTC grew out of Provable Things, a London-based development team founded in 2016 and formerly known as Oraclize. The company had built a widely used blockchain oracle for decentralized applications, giving smart contracts access to external data. By 2019, the rise of DeFi exposed a gap: most activity was on Ethereum, while Bitcoin holders could not use BTC directly in smart contract protocols.

Under founder Thomas Bertani, the team developed pTokens as a bridge system for moving assets between blockchains. The first product was pBTC, a 1:1 tokenized version of Bitcoin on Ethereum. It was designed to let BTC holders access DeFi without selling their coins for ETH or other assets.

pTokens launched on the Ethereum mainnet on March 5, 2020, with pBTC as the first live token. Bancor Network and Kyber Network were early integrators, providing initial liquidity. The main competitor was Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC), launched in 2019 with support from BitGo. While wBTC used a centralized custodian model, pBTC was built around Trusted Execution Environment technology to reduce reliance on a single intermediary.

After Ethereum, pBTC expanded to EOS, and Bitfinex added support for the token. In 2020, pLTC adopted the same model for Litecoin, while Eidoo and Provable Things united under the pNetwork brand. On July 31, 2020, pNetwork launched its DAO and PNT token. On September 19, 2021, an attacker exploited the pBTC bridge on Binance Smart Chain and took 277 BTC, worth about $12.4 million. Other pBTC bridges, including Ethereum and EOS, were not affected.