Hello,
We are joined by Arjun Chand from LiFi today to discuss all things bridges. They have grown into an ecosystem handling close to $20 billion today. As the number of blockchain ecosystems increase, bridges will become crucial infrastructure enabling the movement of money between them.
LiFi is a dominant player facilitating SDKs for developers looking to embed bridges in their applications. Think of them as tooling that helps developers make their applications function across chains.
Arjun joins us to explain how bridges work, the challenges with maintaining them and the trade-offs involved in developing bridges for new ecosystems. Along the way, he also explains how industries tend to adopt new standards. You can listen to the podcast directly on Substack, or use the following links
In a multichain world, exchanging value and information across chains has become a norm. If you want to access an airdrop on Arbitrum based on the activity of your wallet on Ethereum, you will have to bridge some small amount of ETH as gas to Arbitrum. If you want to mint an NFT on Solana but have all your funds on Ethereum, you must use some bridge to get your stables on Solana.
Why is this a big deal? The chart below offers some clues. At close to 325k users each week, bridging related applications see the most users and money flowing through them.
More than $3 billion worth of value was moved in the last week alone. As of March 25, over $20 billion is locked in bridge contracts. It's safe to say that bridges are crucial and here to stay.
Arjun has had a front-seat view watching this critical infrastructure evolve over the years. He has built a following writing long-forms on bridges as a theme. You can read some of it in the following links.
Listen to the podcast for context on how bridges are enabling that transition and the economic opportunity in building them.
Happy Weekend!
Saurabh
Podcast Episode: Arjun from LiFi