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During the first week of September, the Wormhole Network’s ethereum ↔ solana bridge was introduced to the Solana community and the following week, developers released a bi-directional connection for blockchain non-fungible token (NFT) collectibles. On Monday, the Wormhole dev team revealed it has added Binance Smart Chain support to the token and NFT bridge platform.
Wormhole Now Connects Solana to Binance Smart Chain
The crypto asset solana (SOL) has propelled its way to the top seventh position, in terms of market valuation, among 10,000+ digital assets in existence. Now, year-to-date, SOL has gained 5,987% but during the last 30 days, SOL is down close to 18% on October 11. Much like Ethereum, Solana’s protocol is used for decentralized finance (defi) and there’s a myriad of defi platforms built specifically for the Solana network.
1/ We're excited to announce support for @BinanceChain on the Wormhole network! Starting today, users will be able to seamlessly bridge both tokens and NFTs across the ETH, SOL, and BSC ecosystems!
— Wormhole (@wormholecrypto) October 11, 2021
One specific project leveraged by a number of SOL users is the Wormhole Network, which has recently surpassed $200 million total value locked (TVL). As discussed in a recent article by Bitcoin.com News, cross-chain bridge technology has grown exponentially in recent months.
Moreover, metrics recorded this week by Dune Analytics show TVL across a myriad of bridges has swelled to over $14 billion. The Wormhole Network allows users to leverage ethereum ↔ solana swaps at any time and now users can connect to the Binance Smart Chain in the same fashion.
Cross-Chain Use Cases Across 3 Vibrant Blockchains
Data shows that the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) is a popular defi blockchain that connects with a number of other networks. The BSC Anyswap Bridge is one connection that is utilized to leverage cross-chain technology. Last month, the BSC chain did about ten times the number of transactions settled on the Ethereum chain last month.
The connection with the Wormhole Network will allow users to access the vast BSC ecosystem, the project’s announcement sent to Bitcoin.com News details. Wormhole adds that implementing support for the BSC protocol will allow users to:
- Avoid double wrapping as tokens are able to retain their original mint.
- Connect creators and artists through its multi-directional highway to move NFTs and wrapped assets cross-chain between participating ecosystems.
- Allowing for cross-chain governance, liquid staking tokens, and access to oracle data across the three chains with $172B in TVL.
While $200 million is an increase for the Wormhole Network (WN) bridge, it pales in size to the Polygon Bridges which capture $4.5 billion TVL today, and Fantom Anyswap Bridge’s $4.2 billion. In fact, bridges stemming from Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Zksync also have larger TVLs than the WN bridge.