The state of Crypto Bridging: Numbers and Assets for the most popular Bridges
Blockchains are an excellent medium to transfer assets between addresses inside their network. And that was enough for some time, when users interacting with a specific blockchain were interested in what was happening inside this siloed environment.
With the evolution of use cases and technologies, the number of blockchains offering specific solutions increased, and hence the need to move assets from one to another. Bridges came into the scene to provide this interaction and to enable the asset flow between separate blockchains.
In a non-technical explanation, in most cases, a bridge is a set of applications (smart contracts) that enables assets to be sent from one blockchain to another. In this article we will focus on bridges’ TVL, breakdown by asset bridged, and chains served by it, where applicable.
Our main objective is to provide a set of visualization tools for an in-depth analysis of the asset distribution between several bridges. The common sense assumption would be that the asset distribution profile would be similar on the bridges featured, but that’s not always the case.
Some bridges have asymmetries between the assets locked on them versus their share of the overall TVL. These insights help us make a focused analysis of what is different in each case. We will cover some outliers further in the document.
