The state of cross-chain: How Across wins on speed and why that matters
Tldr; Across consistently ranks as the fastest cross-chain bridge in the crypto ecosystem. It almost always scores ahead of competitors on mean and median fill times, proving the strength of its optimistic design pattern.
Key takeaways:
- Across is almost always the fastest bridge for moving assets between chains in the crypto ecosystem.
- Across uses relayers and liquidity providers to fill orders, which improves speed, security, and capital efficiency.
- Recent cross-chain activity validates Across’ optimistic design, proving the tech works.
The Across team spends a lot of time thinking about the state of the cross-chain landscape. We’re always reflecting on how the multi-chain future could look and the role Across will play within it, but our ideas are guided by what we see happening in the space today.
We’re in a fortunate position because we have a robust dataset managed by our team of data science wizards, and this gives us a holistic picture of where the cross-chain space is at in 2023. We recently pulled apart the numbers to find that Across dominates in bridge aggregator usage (and explained why that makes us bullish).
But we’ve also studied other important metrics like fill times to inform us of Across’ market position. The numbers point to a clear fact: Across is the world’s fastest bridge for moving assets through the crypto ecosystem.
For the second edition in our series on the state of cross-chain, we break down fill times between Across and its competitors in Q2 2023 and explain why Across consistently wins on speed. We also explore what this means for optimistic design patterns and the endgame for cross-chain interoperability.
Why Across is fast
Across is one of 100+ cross-chain bridges in the crypto ecosystem. Each of them serves a similar purpose: to help users move their crypto between blockchains.
While bridges are broadly working towards the same goal, Across takes a different approach in its design. Instead of using mint and burn or native swap mechanisms, Across uses relayers to fill orders and LPs to reimburse relayers.
This means relayers and LPs take on risk on behalf of users, and they get orders done extremely quickly.
Barring cases where whales are looking to move serious size, relayers always have the funds ready to fill orders once UMA’s optimistic oracle verifies the relay. This means Across excels in speed, beating other bridges by a meaningful margin.
In Q2 2023, Across’ average order fill time was 136.6 seconds.
Notably, Across saw two spikes with longer transfer times on April 3 and June 15. Some orders suffered from delays due to high utilization rates for WETH and USDC, slowing down relayer recapitalization. Such spikes typically affect whales making larger orders where relayers do not have enough capital to fill them. While infrequent, the Across team is researching solutions to mitigate this issue.
While most bridges lagged significantly behind Across in average fill times in Q2 2023, Celer’s cBridge trailed closely behind as the second fastest bridge. Like Across, cBridge is a liquidity network bridge that uses LPs to fill orders. The key difference is that it doesn’t have an optimistic design.
Across’ median fill time in Q2 2023 was 54 seconds. That ranks Across ahead of every other bridge barring Stargate, whose median came in at 39 seconds. Across’ median fill time aligns with the mean figure, showing an even distribution with few outliers. This shows Across is consistently fast.
While Stargate had the lowest median fill time in Q2 2023, its average fill time was among the slowest at 498.7 seconds. This hints that while Stargate fills some orders very quickly, it is not consistently fast as many orders take much longer to arrive.
It’s worth noting that the distribution of activity on a bridge’s supported routes could impact the median transfer times. If the majority of transactions were executed between Optimism and Arbitrum, for example, this could heavily reduce the median figure regardless of the average fill time to and from Ethereum (Layer 2 >> Layer 2 transfers are significantly faster than Layer 1 >> Layer 2).
How other bridges rank (and why people use them)
Stargate is not always the fastest bridge, but it is currently the most used one. As we discussed in our report on cross-chain aggregators, factors such as product awareness and airdrop farming may explain its popularity.
Other products like Hop and Synapse are much slower than Across, but people still use them every day. There could be many reasons for this, but they all lead back to the same crypto catch phrase: “it’s still early.”
Across may be the fastest bridge on the market today, but the cross-chain space is still in its infancy. No cross-chain project has yet achieved network effect or made multi-chain interoperability happen, and it will take years for the space to mature.
Across’ dominance on speed, price, and security isn’t enough to make it the go-to bridge for all crypto transfers today. While the best tech is likely to win on a long-term time horizon, people will naturally drift between options based on their previous experiences, engagement with the community, and other factors.
Optimistic on optimistic designs
Perhaps the most notable takeaway from Across’ dominance in speed is the positive picture it paints for optimistic design patterns.
Across is faster than its competitors, and this shows that its optimistic approach works.
Thanks to relayers and LPs, users get their orders filled fast. They don’t have to sit around waiting or use wrapped tokens — they just collect their order and go and use their assets on the destination chain.
We expect to see more designs similar to Across gain pace in the crypto ecosystem in the future, where optimistic oracles like UMA verify data and record it onchain. The world’s top DEX, Uniswap, shared its enthusiasm for designs like Across only last month when it announced its new intents-based protocol, UniswapX.
Why speed matters
On very long-term timescales, the best tech usually wins. Users tend to gravitate towards the best option to suit their needs, and in many cases they don’t even make a conscious choice as aggregators serve them the best solution.
Cross-chain activity from Q2 2023 proves that Across is the fastest bridge, but it also beats out competition in price and security. We’ll explore this point in more detail in further editions of this blog series.
The numbers show that Across wins on tech, and that bodes well for the future. Though the cross-chain space is still young and multi-chain interoperability is not yet solved, Across is well-positioned to lead for years to come.
The data for this piece was compiled by Across Protocol’s data and research team. It specifically examines Q2 2023. To make as fair a comparison as possible between bridges, the data have been filtered to focus on only tokens and chains supported by Across Protocol. It also excludes canonical bridges as regular users typically favor non-canonical bridges.
