📝 Quick Note:
In case you missed it, our Community Editorial Calendar for March is live! Contributors can reach out to Owen, who works on editorial ops, on Telegram (@ofernau) if they would like to participate in a specific issue.
EXCLUSIVE ONCHAIN COVERAGE:
Bridges 🌁
① LI.FI 🦎
👥 Arjun Chand | Website | Dashboard
📈 Solving multi-chain fragmentation with aggregation – LI.FI crosses the $4B volume milestone.
LI.FI is a multi-chain trading API for financial institutions and DeFi projects. It offers standard API interfaces for swaps and bridging across EVM chains and Solana by tapping into liquidity from bridges, DEXs, DEX aggregators, and solvers.
LI.FI has strong distribution across the ecosystem, with partners like MetaMask, Phantom, Hyperliquid, DeFi Saver, Gnosis Pay, and 200+ others. To date, LI.FI has serviced 2.46M unique wallets, facilitating 4.9M txs and handling over $4B in volume.
Jumper is the flagship app on LI.FI, offering users one-interface for swaps and bridging on and across chains. In 2024, Jumper has serviced over $1.13B in volume and is seeing increased activity. Jumper’s support for Solana puts it in an exclusive list of apps that support EVM & non-evm chains.
LI.FI is a major source of order flow for bridges. For example, in February, Across captured $191.34M in orderflow from 140.2k txs routed via LI.FI. This makes up ~25% of Across’ total volume for the month, illustrating the strategic importance of aggregator alignment for bridges.
💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Apps are integrating LI.FI to make their interface stickier by improving the overall user experience, thereby increasing user retention and activity. Case study – A user on Seamless protocol on Base has 30k USDC but wants to deposit 30k DAI to earn higher yield. In this tx flow, LI.FI’s smart routing algorithm splits the order and routes it through multiple protocols, ensuring the end user receives 30k DAI without any slippage or fee.
② Across 💲
👥 Lewis Harland | Website | Dashboard
📈 Across bridge volume surpasses $770m monthly bridge volume, YTD fees now >50% of 2023 total
Across protocol is a cross-chain bridge for L2s and mainnet Ethereum secured by UMA’s optimistic oracle. Across facilitated $770M in total monthly bridge volume in February, +44% from January's print and 23% 3-month avg. growth rate. YTD annualized fees at $1.7M ($10.4M ann.) are already 53% and 76% of total fees taken in 2023 and 2022 respectively. Across still commands a healthy 28% market share globally.
Across aims to provide the cheapest and fastest bridge infrastructure for EVM chains. Fees as a % of bridge volume are nearly the lowest in the market (0.12%), second to Connext at 0.08%. Across has consistently remained competitive in fees relative to the competition over the past year.
Across is the venue for 30% of bridge txs through bridge aggregator LI.FI and 52%+ of its bridge volume. Analyzing aggregator volume is one approach to evaluating a protocol's realized cost/speed in the market on the assumption that users prefer/choose the lowest cost, fastest option when bridging.
💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Across uses actors called relayers to fulfil user transfer requests. This address is one of the most active relayers, generating over $4B in bridge volume for Across in over 4.3k transactions and remains active to this day.
③ Socket Bridge 🔌
👥 Reuben | Website | Dashboard
📈 Socket has facilitated more than $4.6B worth of bridged assets since March 2023
Socket is an interoperability protocol which powers seamless asset & data transfers for apps across blockchains. It also provides a bridge aggregator for wallets to move assets across chains. Currently, 944k wallets have moved over $4.7B worth of assets from 3.9M transactions through the Socket bridge.
Usage of Socket's bridge has been increasing, with last month recording an ATH volume of $1.2B (more than double of the next highest in Dec. 2023). Transactions using the bridge and unique wallets also hits ATHs of 566k and 193k. USDC ($2B combined), ETH ($1.87B) and USDT ($0.72B) were the most bridged assets.
At $1.4B, Arbitrum is the biggest chain to have assets sent to in Socket, accounting for 30% of Socket's total bridged volume. It also recently surpassed Ethereum, with 37% more volume bridged. A look at daily volume share amidst the bridges used in Socket reveal Across and Stargate to be the biggest bridges (44% and 42% respectively).
💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: A user bridged 42.3 ETH, worth over $100,000, from Ethereum to Arbitrum in February. This was one of the largest transactions on Socket in the interoperability protocol's hottest month.
④ Synapse 🌉
👥 Socrates | Website | Dashboard
📈 Synapse Crosses $45B+ in volume, 2M+ users
Synapse RFQ (request for quote) turns every bridge transaction into an auction. Users submit their bridge requests, and relayers compete with each other to provide the best possible quote. The launch of RFQ has decreased the average bridge time from 20min+ on Optimism to 10 seconds.
Synapse is the first 3rd party bridge to launch on Blast. Since deployment, it has settled >$50M of volume, and $7M in TVL. Interestingly, due to locked funds on Blast, users are currently receiving positive slippage to bridge to Blast.
Driven by the launch of RFQ and the general crypto market gaining momentum, bridge volumes have been growing 40% week over week. The last month’s volume annualizes to $20B/year in bridge volume and $16M in fees, not including swap volume and fees.
💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: This is a Synapse bridge transaction that routes a user transaction through Synapse X and Synapse RFQ. The user wants to bridge ~41k USDT through Synapse, and the best quote is provided by RFQ, but RFQ doesnt natively support USDT yet. Thus, the router routes the transaction through Synapse X, which swaps USDT for USDC on Uniswap, and then bridges the resulting USDC through Synapse RFQ. The user then receives ~41k on Ethereum, within 30 seconds of initially bridging.
Quick Links: Disclosures
