About the editor: Spencer Noon is Co-founder & General Partner at Variant.

Network Coverage
Coverage on Nomad, Wormhole & Terra Bridge, Connext, Hop Protocol, NEAR Rainbow Bridge, and Synapse.

• Nomad is a novel approach to blockchain interoperability that leverages an optimistic mechanism to increase the security of cross-chain communication. Nomad channels and the flagship xApp (cross-chain app), the Nomad token bridge, are live on Ethereum, Moonbeam, and Milkomeda, with more chains coming soon. The token bridge has only been live for 3 months and has amassed $288m in volume with $47m TVL. The team has plans to deploy on 10 more chains over the next 1-2 months.

• The number of transactions over time has been steadily growing with about 2.7k total transactions to date. The number of daily users and cross-chain messages will continue to trend at a higher rate as Nomad has come out of stealth and will launch on more chains.

• Nomad's locked asset distribution is made up of 33.6% $USDC followed by 29.7% $FRAX, which makes up a total of $30M of the current TVL. However, $USDT and $WETH have made a surge in the past couple of days on the Moonbeam side, and $WETH and $WBTC are quite popular bridging over to Milkomeda.

• Wormhole has quickly become one of the most popular bridges in crypto. Gaining adoption, it now has ~$3.5b in assets locked. Terra contributes heavily to Wormhole’s TVL with 5 out of the top 10 assets (bETH, UST, aUST, sAVAX & LUNA) either leaving or being sent to Terra. Additionally, almost 40% of the TVL is driven by bETH, which is the Lido staked version of ETH used as collateral on Terra’s Anchor Protocol.

• Looking at Terra’s adoption of Wormhole, it seems that users have been migrating from the Terra-native Shuttle bridge since October. Wormhole launched on Terra in October 2021, and over the past 6 months, Wormhole now accounts for 40% of bridge users sending and receiving assets from Terra.

• Comparing all the chains connected by the Wormhole bridge, Ethereum and Terra receive and send similar volumes of assets.

• Connext is a cross-chain liquidity bridge, currently connecting thirteen EVM-based chains with each other. It is a non-custodial and very capital-efficient way to bridge assets from one chain to another. Since the launch of their liquidity bridge in August 2021, Connext has facilitated almost $900m in volume, spread across 732k transactions. Average daily transaction volume in the past 30 days was $2.5m ($75m total) vs $5.3m in January and $3.6m in February.

• An interesting observation is the in- and outgoing number of transactions. Over the last 30 days, the bulk of outflows came from Gnosis chain, which was the chain with the highest inflows last time. The highest number of incoming transactions was observed on Polygon, whilst most other chains remained balanced.

• The number of routers is steadily increasing: there are currently 48 routers active on Connext, providing a total of $40m in liquidity, which is roughly double the amount vs what was reported last time (on both numbers).