Across Protocol: Based on Intents

Overview

Over the past year, the Across protocol demonstrated notable growth. Average daily volumes through the bridging protocol rose over 1000% from a low of $2M to over $30M.

In addition, the bridge gained substantial volume dominance and market share against its competitors. This is represented in the chart below, plotting Across bridge volume as a percentage of total bridge volume. A year ago, Across accounted for as low as 1.6% of all bridge volume and has since climbed to a high of 13.3%. Trough to peak, this represents a 730% gain in market share against its competitors.

The Across protocol is the second large-scale product built out of Risk Labs, the team behind the Universal Market Access (UMA) optimistic oracle. UMA has secured over $1.3B in onchain commitments, and the optimistic oracle provides critical infrastructure for the verification and settlement of volumes through Across.

While the growth in volumes and market share is impressive, Across simultaneously boasts one of the fastest and cheapest bridge products. Fills are usually satisfied in under a minute, sometimes even sub-second, fees average around 14 bps, and users receive no slippage. This protocol is emerging as a viable solution to address several issues present in Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap; namely, high liquidity fragmentation, low interoperability, and poor user-experience. While Ethereum L2s proliferate, as will the scale of these problems. This context necessitates viable cross-chain infrastructure.