We are thrilled to share the news of our seed investment in deBridge, a cross-chain liquidity transfer protocol built on Chainlink. We are joined in this round by our friends at Parafi, Lemniscap and many others.
At the beginning of 2021 we witnessed the explosive growth of Binance Smart Chain (BSC), an EVM compatible layer-1 blockchain prioritizing scalability over decentralization. Much of this growth was fueled by high yield liquidity rewards distributed to bootstrap the ecosystem on platforms like Pancakeswap. For us and many others this was the first time we had seen a compelling reason to bridge significant amounts of liquidity from Ethereum to another layer-1.
We soon realized it was no simple task. The official Binance bridge was rate limited in the amount of liquidity you could send per day. Getting new assets whitelisted was improbable, and US-based IP addresses were not allowed. In fact, most of the folks we talked to were using the binance.com centralized exchange to move liquidity to BSC instead of the on-chain bridge.
The next generation bridge
This experience made us realize there was a need for a fundamentally redeveloped bridging infrastructure. That’s where deBridge comes in, to offer a decentralized bridging protocol that takes the pressure of hosting a bridge off of any centralized authority. deBridge makes this possible with a network of Chainlink oracle nodes (validators) that process transactions. We’re proud to say that we will be running a validator on Mainnet with the help of our devops wizard @ppcryptOG.
With the growth of multi-chain DeFi, even when many protocols such as Avalanche and Polygon have smooth working Ethereum bridging solutions, there is huge demand for a protocol that can swap from chain to chain directly without stopping at Ethereum in between and incurring high gas fees. From the mainnet launch, deBridge will support Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, HECO, and Arbitrum, with many other chains in the pipeline.
In the future, this direct chain to chain bridging capability will allow third party dapps to perform complex cross-chain transactions with relative ease using the deBridge API. We can’t even imagine what the dev community will build with this enormous power at their fingertips for the first time ever.
The deBridge protocol revenue
The deBridge token will be a governance token for the protocol. The first source of revenue for the protocol is small transaction fees. Additionally, deBridge is capable of performing “fractional bridging”, leveraging a portion of locked assets to earn yield. The protocol is positioned to capture value from DeFi users on half a dozen chains.
The deBridge team
Alex Smirnov is the founder of deBridge. Prior to deBridge Alex ran a large blockchain development studio. Alex and the development team have excellent technical abilities, as demonstrated in their Chainlink hackathon victory. We are excited to back them, and to help them become the standard for cross-chain interoperability and liquidity transfers!
