Cross-chain bridge tokens moon as crypto shifts toward interoperability

Inter­op­er­abil­i­ty is shap­ing up to be one of the main themes for the cryp­tocur­ren­cy mar­ket in 2022 as projects across the ecosys­tem unveil inte­gra­tions that make their net­works Ethereum (ETH) Vir­tu­al Machine (EVM) compatible.

While this has been one of the long-term goals of the ecosys­tem as a step on the path to an inter­con­nect­ed net­work of pro­to­cols, it has also cre­at­ed a new decen­tral­ized finance (DeFi) mar­ket for mul­ti-chain bridges and decen­tral­ized finance.

Here are three of the top vol­ume cross-chain bridges that the cryp­tocur­ren­cy com­mu­ni­ty uses to trans­fer assets between blockchain networks. 

Multichain

Mul­ti­chain (MULTI), for­mer­ly known as Anyswap, is a cross-chain router pro­to­col that aims to become the go-to router for the emerg­ing Web3 ecosystem. 

Accord­ing to data from Defi Lla­ma, Mul­ti­chain is the top-ranked cross-chain swap pro­to­col by total val­ue locked, with $8.95 bil­lion cur­rent­ly locked on the platform. 

One of the main rea­sons for the high TVL on Mul­ti­chain is the large num­ber of blockchain net­works sup­port­ed by the pro­to­col. Cur­rent­ly, 30 dif­fer­ent chain­scan be accessed on the network. 

Accord­ing to data pro­vid­ed by Mul­ti­chain, the pro­to­col has processed a total of $53.15 bil­lion worth of vol­ume since launch­ing, with $19.08 bil­lion of that being trans­act­ed in the past 30 days alone. There are cur­rent­ly 485,399 users that have inter­act­ed with the Mul­ti­chain pro­to­col, amount­ing to near­ly 2.256 mil­lion transactions. 

Users who deposit tokens into one of the pools sup­port­ed by Mul­ti­chain receive a sare of the trans­ac­tion fees gen­er­at­ed by the pool in question. 

The pro­to­col’s native MULTI token is used to vote and par­tic­i­pate in the gov­er­nance of the Mul­ti­chain ecosys­tem and has a cir­cu­lat­ing sup­ply of 18.64 mil­lion tokens out of a total 100 million. 

Synapse

Synapse (SYN) refers to itself as a “cross-chain lay­er ∞ pro­to­col” that is designed to offer users inter­op­er­abil­i­ty between sep­a­rate blockchain networks. 

Accord­ing to data from Defi Lla­ma, Synapse recent­ly hit an all-time high in total val­ue locked of $1.16 bil­lion pri­or to expe­ri­enc­ing a wave of out­flows that low­ered the TVL to 740.43 million. 

The Synapse pro­to­col cur­rent­ly sup­ports 12 dif­fer­ent chains which have a com­bined total bridged vol­ume of $5.33 bil­lion accord­ing to data from the platform’s dashboard.

A large per­cent­age of the total vol­ume record­ed on Synapse has come since the start of 2022 with the pro­to­col see­ing an all-time high bridge vol­ume of $157.8 mil­lion on Jan. 23. 

The pro­to­col’s native SYN token has sev­er­al uses with­in the ecosys­tem. Token hold­ers can use it to con­duct com­mu­ni­ty gov­er­nance votes via the SynapseDAO, liq­uid­i­ty providers (LPs) receive a per­cent­age yield paid out in SYN for their deposits and it is also used as a sub­sidy to pay for the gas expend­ed by net­work val­ida­tors to secure trans­ac­tions across the network.

LPs also receive a share of the pro­to­col fees earned by the Synapse plat­form on each transaction. 

Relat­ed: Web3 inno­va­tions are replac­ing mid­dle­men with mid­dle­ware protocols

Celer cBridge

Anoth­er pop­u­lar cross-chain bridge is the Cel­er cBridge, a mul­ti-chain net­work that enables instant, low-cost val­ue trans­fers between 19 dif­fer­ent networks. 

The cBridge is a sub­sec­tor of the larg­er Cel­er (CELR) ecosys­tem and uti­lizes the CELR token for oper­a­tions on the pro­to­col and as the reward token for liq­uid­i­ty providers. 

Along with the CELR rewards paid to LPs, a per­cent­age of the trans­ac­tion fees gen­er­at­ed by peo­ple who use the liq­uid­i­ty pools to bridge funds across chains are paid out to LPs and added direct­ly to the pools, allow­ing the rewards to compound. 

Accord­ing to data from cBridge ana­lyt­ics, the total val­ue of funds locked in the bridge con­tract (pool-based bridge) and the funds locked in the token vault con­tract (canon­i­cal token bridge) cur­rent­ly stands at $240.92 million. 

A total of 89,897 unique address­es have inter­act­ed with the pro­to­col since incep­tion and have con­duct­ed a total of $2.842 bil­lion in trans­ac­tion volume. 

Sim­i­lar to the trans­fer trend seen with Synapse, the trans­ac­tion vol­ume on cBridge has got­ten notice­ably high­er in 2022 with a record $71.12 mil­lion being trans­act­ed on Jan. 22. 

Some of the pro­to­cols cur­rent­ly sup­port­ed by cBridge include Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, Poly­gon, Fan­tom, Metis, Har­mo­ny, Gno­sis, Arbi­trum and Optimism. 

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