Terra Partners with Solana to Establish Low-Latency Bridge, Expanding Its Stablecoin Ecosystem to New Web-Scale Blockchain

Today, we’re excited to announce a new high-speed token bridge with Solana, the world’s first web-scale blockchain. The bridge will facilitate the transfer of Terra stablecoins between the two networks.

Our goal with Terra is to repair an inefficient payments industry. Using current infrastructure, payments from one party to another using different currencies can take up to 7–10 business days to process. This unnecessary lag has significantly slowed the adoption of digital payments, especially in Southeast Asia. Making matters worse, middlemen gouge users and vendors with high fees and take home more than $15 billion dollars a year.

Since launch, we’ve seen massive adoption through the CHAI app. We’re proud to report that we recently crossed 1 million monthly active users and over $3 Million USD in daily transaction volume. By partnering directly with several conglomerates in Asia, we’ve been able to offer streamlined payment experiences charging 0.5% compared to the industry standards of 3.5%, helping users save a great deal of money on every transaction.

As we continue to grow, we expect demand to expand into new regions and new blockchain ecosystems beyond our own. Anticipating this, we recognize the priority of building bridges and relationships to grow the reach of Terra’s stablecoins within the Solana ecosystem. Working together, we believe this partnership will foster a thriving community of dApps that leverage the strengths of both Solana’s speed and Terra’s stablecoin ecosystem.

Solana was built from the ground up to perform at web-scale. It delivers up to 50,000 transactions per second with 400ms block times on the mainnet today. Solana can also process 1 million distinct transactions for only $10 of total cost.

We anticipate the coming technical developments to be successful and ultimately greatly benefit both communities. This bridge will help expand the adoption of Terra stablecoins while also enabling the full potential of open finance applications on top of Solana. Stablecoins are critical for injecting liquidity and hedging against volatility risk. Examples include the upcoming binary options platform that Solana has been developing through the use of Chainlink’s oracles on DDEX as a decentralized alternative to that of centralised exchanges.

To explain how the bridge works, we can describe a burn-mint model via mirrored smart contracts on Terra and Solana, contract T and contract S respectively. Users can then mint specific Terra tokens on Solana by calling a burn transaction on T and minting a transaction on S by submitting a proof to Solana that the Terra tokens were burned on T. This works in both directions, creating a two-way warp.

This bridge will open up opportunities for both ecosystems as the importance of laying down this infrastructural groundwork cannot be understated and will facilitate the growth and flourishing of both blockchain ecosystems.

We’re grateful for the support shown by Solana’s team and our community and we’re excited about the new horizons this bridge will facilitate.

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