Why bridge from Ethereum?

Out of the 13,000+ bridging transactions listed by the XP.NETWORK Explorer, almost 23% (2,950) feature Ethereum. These are fairly evenly distributed between transactions where Ethereum is the origin and where it is the destination.

We’ll come back to the meaning of this number later, but now let’s examine the reasons why NFT projects on Ethereum choose to expand to other chains. Based on our collaborations with 100+ collections, we can name these:

1) Launching a game, metaverse, or another utility dApp on another chain. NFT projects will need to focus on utility in order to survive the bear market and flourish in the next bull run. But let’s be honest – you can’t have a metaverse game on Ethereum.

So it makes sense to do the initial NFT mint on Ethereum with its high liquidity, get it sold out (hopefully) – then build the actual product on a chain that’s optimized for gaming and metaverses. For example, XP.NETWORK supports MultiversX, SKALE, and Godwoken – all very good options with near-zero fees and processing speeds above 1,000 TPS.

2) A cheaper, faster way to increase the community and sales. Every NFT project hits a growth barrier on its home chain at some point. That’s the law of diminishing returns. Every dollar you invest in marketing just seems to bring fewer new followers and sales.

You can increase the marketing budget or (better) its efficiency, but there’s another way: bridging. In a different ecosystem, a project is new and interesting to the community, and you can get much better returns on marketing spending.

3) Experimentation. Sometimes, we have partner projects that bridge a few NFTs from Ethereum and then don’t do anything else with the XP.NETWORK bridge for a couple of months. This is fine: NFT bridging is an explosive technology that you should play with even if you’re not planning a bridging campaign.

Why bridge to Ethereum?

Let’s say you’re already building an NFT game on a very efficient chain like MultiversX. What would make you bridge to the slow and expensive Ethereum?

1) Increase sales and visibility. If the team has an unsold part of the collection, they can send it to Ethereum to benefit from the high liquidity. The bridging and gas fees can be offset by the higher prices you can fetch on OpenSea – especially if you use XP.NETWORK’s exclusive batch-bridging algorithm.

2) Engagement. A project can host a contest or giveaway centered on bridging: for example, send an NFT to Ethereum, list it on OpenSea, post a proof, and win another NFT. It’s a bit more technical than your usual “retweet and win” activities, but this way you can also stand out from the crowd.

In such cases, it’s important to remind the users that there are gas fees to pay on both chains, plus a small bridging fee. All the fees are paid in the coins of the origin network, but when bridging to Ethereum, users will need to have enough of those coins to cover Ethereum’s fees, which fluctuate a lot.

3) Bridging back. If you just sent NFTs from Ethereum as an experiment, chances are you’ll want them back on the home chain at some point. We have a lot of transaction pairs like that in the Explorer.

Bridging with XP.NETWORK from Ethereum: statistics and analysis

XP.NETWORK Bridge Explorer is an amazing analytical tool – and the first blockchain explorer centered on NFTs. You can filter bridging transactions by origin and destination chain, transaction type (transfer or unfreezing – meaning unlocking the original NFT from the contract when bridging back), and status (completed/pending).

It’s interesting to see which chains are the most popular for bridging NFTs to and from Ethereum. The all-time stats on XP.NETWORK give us the following.

From Ethereum:

• MultiversX: 1127

• VeChain 223

• Others: 177

The statistics are striking: 74% of all NFTs that left Ethereum ended up on MultiversX, formerly known as Elrond. This became possible thanks to the migration of Drifters, probably the most successful NFT cross-chain expansion of all time.

After the massive bridging campaign, Drifters became one of the top-selling projects on MultiversX: read our case study here. MultiversX has a booming NFT ecosystem with many original projects, and we recommend that you give it attention.

The presence of VeChain ($VET) at no.2 can also seem surprising, as many are unfamiliar with this enterprise-centered blockchain. However, VeChain has a very active NFT market of its own, and a very loyal community.

The leader in terms of bridging is ExoWorlds, a VeChain-native sci-fi MMORPG where you can explore and collect planets. Over 700 of these planets were bridged to Ethereum in 2022, and some were later unfrozen (bridged back) – these are the transactions you see in the Explorer.

As for the rest of NFT bridging transactions from Ethereum, they are a very mixed and colorful group: you can find projects expanding to Arbitrum Nova, TON, Moonbeam, etc.

Which NFTs moved to Ethereum?

When we look at the opposite bridging direction (all chains to Ethereum), VeChain is the no.1 origin chain thanks to the 700+ExoWorlds planets that were  moved in August 2022. That’s  almost 50% of the total number of NFT transactions (1415) that our bridge sent to Ethereum.

BSC accounts for almost 200 bridged NFTs, largely thanks to TreatDAO – an adult NFT content platform that we wrote about in a different case study. MultiversX is in the 3rd position with a lot of Innovators from the Drifters project.

As we are writing this, there is a big bridging campaign in process from TON to Ethereum: TON Frogs. This is the first time a TON project expands to Ethereum – not surprising, really, since XP.NETWORK is the only NFT bridge to support this chain pair, and we only integrated TON recently. Follow our case studies to learn about TON Frogs and what this move means for the market.

77% of XP.NETWORK bridging transactions are non-Ethereum – and that’s a good thing

At the start of this case study, we mentioned that around 23% of all the XP.NETWORK bridge transactions feature Ethereum. At the same time, Ethereum accounted for 81% of the total NFT trading volume, according to DappRadar.

For us, this is a positive statistic. At XP.NETWORK, we believe in a unified cross-chain market where NFTs flow effortlessly between networks. This ecosystem of the future won’t look like a solar system with a huge star (Ethereum) in the center and small “planets” around it, but rather like an interconnected framework of equally important chains.

The fact that 77% of NFT bridging transactions don’t feature Ethereum proves our point. Projects and users are interested in bridging between Polygon and MultiversX, Caduceus and BSC, Tezos and Harmony, and so on. The more we encourage such diversity, the faster we can reach our vision: a unified NFT ecosystem without barriers.