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

Network Coverage
Coverage on Multichain, Optimism Bridge, Wormhole, and LayerZero.

• Multichain (previously Anyswap) is a cross-chain router protocol that offers bridging support for over 2,667 tokens and recently added NFT bridging functionality as well. Since launching in July of 2020, Multichain has quickly become one of the most popular bridges and now supports 61 chains. According to DeFi Llama, Multichain has the third largest TVL of any bridge with $1.83b. Fantom accounts for a majority of the TVL with ~$1.1b, followed by nearly $280m on Ethereum and ~$252m on Avalanche.

• Multichain is the most popular bridging protocol on 7 of the top 10 chains in terms of TVL. As a result, Multichain recently surpassed $80b in total trade volume on May 20th 2022. That total has increased another ~7% to $85.85b. Multichain has also generated over $33m in fees on ~3.9m transactions.

• Because Multichain is the leading bridge on Fantom, it is an effective measure of investor sentiment. In the past 30 days on the Fantom network, there has been $31.7m deposited and $132.1m withdrawn. This indicates a majority of users are moving their money out of Fantom and deploying it elsewhere.

• Ethereum Mainnet users can bridge tokens to Optimism to take advantage of the chains' improved performance. When an asset is bridged, the Mainnet token is locked into the bridge contract and a new token is minted on the Layer-2 chain. The Total Value Locked (TVL) in a bridge contract is the net value of all assets bridged. The native Optimism Bridge has over $800m of TVL. This is comprised of 36% in ETH and 64% of other ERC-20 tokens.

• The Optimism Bridge has facilitated the transfer of several stablecoins to Optimism. USDC has the highest value locked in the Optimism Bridge contract. As a result, USDC is Optimism's largest asset.

• Some speculate that alt Layer 1 chains like Avalanche will take over as Ethereum's primary scaling method. Avalanche is quite popular and has amassed more than $2b in TVL. User preferences, though, seem to be shifting. Avalanche is losing ground to Optimism in terms of bridge transfer volumes.

• The TVL on Wormhole bridge has come down significantly from a high of $4.67b to ~$500m. 80% of this TVL is locked on Ethereum with ETH accounting for about $174m. Terra, despite its crash earlier this year, still ranks at #2 by TVL.

• Since most TVL is locked on Ethereum and most of it is ETH, it makes sense to look at where the ETH has been going. A few patterns are noticeable: most ETH has been going to Solana, and the monthly transfer volume is down significantly since December 2021.

• Overall, around 160k ETH has made the trip to Solana. Surprisingly, Oasis Network ranks at #2 after Solana as almost 20k ETH has made its way there.