Synapse | deBridge | Across | zkBridge

• Bridge activity is now over $2B per week, according to bridges that Artemis tracks. There's strong parity across bridges — on most weeks —excluding Circle's CCTP which is used exclusively for USDC transfers— no bridge accounts for more than 20% of volume and most bridges account for between 10 - 20% of volume.

• Daily active addresses for bridges are down over 70% as users looking to sybil airdrops for the ZK-rollups, StarkNet and zkSync, have stopped now that the tokens are live. Across Network is still the top non-canonical bridge with about 7k addresses bridging per day.

• Non-canonical bridges —bridges for generalized cross-chain transactions as opposed to in-house solutions specifically designed to connect two blockchains— have had explosive growth this year, with Circle's CCTP moving roughly $400M per week, which is almost a 10x increase from last year.

• Synapse Protocol is a decentralized interchain network, allowing developers and users to read and write data between different blockchains. To date, over 2M users have used the bridge to settled $50B and generated $30M+ in fees. In the last 6 months, Synapse launched SynapseRFQ, an intents-based bridge designed to offer zero slippage and fast finality. Since its inception, bridge times have decreased 60-80%, meaning that finality is sub-second on some routes, making it one of the fastest bridges.

• In an analysis comparing Synapse, Across, and Stargate covering every route combination between Ethereum and major L2s, the Synapse team found that Synapse offers the best quote on 82% of all routes. Additionally when it is the best quote, the transaction is 85-95% cheaper, meaning the user spends 85-90% less in fees.

• Since its inception in late March 2024, SynapseRFQ has quickly become users favorite way to bridge through Synapse protocol. As liquidity expands, more relayers onboard, and pricing becomes more competitive, almost 95% of Synapse order flow is routed through SynapseRFQ.

• Bridges have historically been able to build an economy, their TVL incentives exceeding fees collected. This has been a major issue for long-term sustainability, and yet deBridge has become the largest bridge economy through the 0-TVL design it launched in early 2023. With $10-180k in fees generated daily, it collects more fees than Stargate, Hop, Connext, Synapse, and other providers put together.

• deBridge has become the leading bridge for Solana, with over 117,000 active Solana users bridging over $2B to/from Solana. Over 30,000 of these are users of Jupiter, the Solana-built exchange aggregator which integrated with deBridge.

• Thanks to deBridge's peer-to-peer bridge engine, users can move $1M+ across blockchains with guaranteed rates and tight spreads. Here, a user bridged $1.65M with an 8 basis point spread.

• Across, one of the leading cross-chain bridges with an intent-based design, has experienced tremendous growth in 2024 with almost a 3-fold rise since December 2023. March to June were crucial months for Across with each month accounting for $1B+ bridging volume and transactions peaking in May 2024. However, post-Q2, there has been a continuous decline in activity. Where Across was topping the bridges sector up until mid-year, it's now ranked 4th on DefiLlama. This may be due to the increased popularity of Stargate V2 which introduced transaction batching, significantly reducing costs by aggregating multiple transactions via "Stargate Buses."

• Over 2M users have used Across for 8.1M transfers for an average of 4 transactions per wallet. Until Q2 2024, the number of new and returning users remained almost equal. Since then, "old" users have overshadowed the new ones — the approximate daily average of old-to-new users is now 2.5-to-1.

• Across charges two primary fees, a "Liquidity Provider Fee" and "Relayer Fee." Relayer fees incentivize relayers to relay a user’s transaction and plays a similar role to gas fees in the Ethereum ecosystem. Liquidity provider fees are distributed to users who provide liquidity. Over the time the protocol has generated over $11.5M fee for its LPs and Relayers.

• Bridge volume has grown significantly year-over-year as new chains continue to go live with incentive mechanisms to attract liquidity to their chain. 24 hour bridge volume on Sept. 19 2024 was $434M compared to $142M the same date previously. The two highest bridge volume days were Mar. 11 2023 when Bitcoin hit an ATH at $71,000 and Aug. 5 2024 when the start of a 30% Bitcoin sell-off started— moments of extreme volatility are opportunities for savvy web3 users who quickly utilize bridges in search of returns.

• zkBridge is consistently in the top 10 bridges by volume with a lower transaction count than others. IBC’s average transfer size over the past 24 hours was $722 compared to zkBridge's $1,591. zkBridge, with stronger security and less trust assumptions, is often preferred for high value transfers.

• Due to frequent collaboration with Binance and a large community overlap with the BNB ecosystem, zkBridge is the #1 bridge by volume for BNB Chain with over $100M in monthly volume. zkBridge is also the official bridge for Binance’s opBNB, the exchange's Layer 2 solution.