📝 Editor’s Note:

Welcome to the latest edition of OurNetwork.

In this issue, we're zooming in on bridging, a space which has been trending up and to the right — bridges have generated daily average volumes of $677M year-to-date in 2025, according to DeFiLlama. That's up nearly double from the $344M daily average in 2024 and over four times the 2022 daily average of $151M in cross-chain volume.

That said, and as the OurNetwork analysts outline below, many individual bridges are struggling to maintain rates of growth in a competitive market.

Let's dig in.

– ON Editorial Team

Stargate | Across | Squid | LI.FI | Wormhole | Jumper

• Stargate Finance is a cross-chain liquidity protocol that enables seamless token transfer between blockchains like Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Linea, Scroll, etc. The protocol has facilitated 5.5M transactions in cross-chain transfers in the past year, which have amounted to $2.1B in total volume. Stargate onboarded 499k unique users in this time frame, indicating the ongoing demand for cross-chain transfers.

• Arbitrum and Ethereum are top in bridge volume with $572M and $386M respectively, while Polygon, Avalanche, and Optimism have moderate volumes, and BNB Chain and Base see the least activity. Arbitrum's lead in bridge volume shows adoption of Layer 2s (L2s) as an improvement to Ethereum.

• Just like any other protocol in crypto, one major challenge is retaining users after onboarding, which we see in the user retention breakdown over the past 12 months. In March 2024, retention was 33% in the first month, but that quickly declined to 18% in the second month and 13% in the third month.

• Across, a leading cross-chain bridging protocol leveraging intents, is approaching a major milestone — $20B in cumulative bridging volume. However, the growth story has taken a turn. After a strong Q4 last year, with December's $2B in volume alone accounting for 10% of its all-time volume, the flow has declined sharply since — January saw a 16% drop, followed by consecutive month-over-month reductions of over 40%.

• The volume decline has hit the relayer fees hard, with an initial drop of 40%, followed by a staggering 80% further decrease. A silver lining — new user acquisition remains relatively consistent. This gives a potential to turn things around by then end of Q1 2025.

• This slowdown is likely due to Across losing ground in its core market, which are emerging rollups. Instead, it’s becoming the default bridge for L2-to-Ethereum exits, with Ethereum now making up over 50% of destination bridges.

• Data on Squid, the cross-chain protocol, reveals a split — high-user routes, going from BNB Chain to Polygon or from Arbitrum to Osmosis, suggest retail activity with frequent small transfers. High-volume routes, like Ethereum to Osmosis, or Binance to Celo, indicate institutional or whale movements. This divergence implies two distinct segments — retail users optimizing for cost, and institutions deploying capital. Tailored incentives, like tiered fees, could optimize engagement for both.

• Signaling market saturation or rivals offering better UX or liquidity, Squid’s new users hit six-month low despite steady volume. Growth now hinges on outperforming competitors or tapping broader adoption.

• Squid faces a retention ceiling — the bridge has ~15-20% month-over-month retention & 21% same-week conversion, yet only 2% of users become regulars. Users bridge once —for airdrops or migrations — but rarely return, making growth acquisition-dependent. Breaking this cycle requires embedding recurring utility beyond one-off transactions.

• LI.FI is an onchain liquidity API to swap, bridge, and zap across all major chains. It provides the most comprehensive price comparison and trade execution across 40+ chains, covering multiple virtual machines — EVM, SVM, and altVMs. It offers the broadest chain and asset coverage, high reliability, and built-in redundancy by pulling from multiple liquidity sources on every chain. With $22B+ in volume, 32M+ transactions and 4.4M unique users to date, LI.FI’s adoption is accelerating rapidly.

• LI.FI’s distribution is growing fast. In a year, active integrators jumped 52.4% from 250 to 381, proving its value. Developers choose LI.FI for a single API that covers all assets, chains, and liquidity sources. They integrate once, go-to market faster, and avoid maintenance overhead.

• LI.FI has found product-market fit with wallets. Every major crypto wallet — Phantom, MetaMask, Rabby, Binance Web3 Wallet, Ledger, Robinhood Wallet and others — has integrated LI.FI. As more wallets integrate LI.FI, the number of transactions and active unique users keeps climbing.

• Wormhole staking analysis across EVM chains shows Ethereum commanding the largest voting power at 79.3%, followed by Base at 13.5%, while Arbitrum and Optimism hold smaller shares at 5.54% and 1.6% respectively. Ethereum maintains dominance despite fluctuating engagement, Base shows strong recent growth in participation, and both Arbitrum and Optimism demonstrate steady staking growth despite their smaller overall footprint.

• Wormhole staking metrics show 99.95k total delegators across chains, with Base leading (71.7k), followed by Arbitrum (19.3k), Optimism (6.9k), and Ethereum (6.94k).

• Wormhole staking shows 100M W tokens, the bridge's native asset, bridged to EVM chains, with Ethereum dominating at 81.4%, followed by Base (12.1%), Arbitrum (5.14%), and Optimism (1.42%). Staking follows the same pattern across chains, with bridging activity peaking in June 2024 per Flipside data.

• Since Jan. 1, 2025, Ethereum and Solana have seen the highest net inflows on Jumper, the cross-chain bridge, while emerging chains like Sonic, Berachain, and Abstract are also gaining traction. In contrast, major L2s such as Optimism, Arbitrum, Linea, Blast, and Scroll, along with alternative L1s like Avalanche and BNB, have experienced the most significant net outflows.

• Jumper has expanded from supporting 15 active chains in January 2024 to 41 today. This growth in multichain activity is fueled by increasing user demand and ecosystem-driven integrations.

• The median transaction time on Jumper has improved tenfold over the past year, dropping from 200 seconds to just 20 seconds. This acceleration is primarily driven by sub-10-second transactions from intent-based bridges like Across and Relay, which are aggregated within Jumper.