The Journey of Becoming the Leader of Cross-Chain Bridges from Anyswap to Multichain

Author: Azuma

Source: Planet Daily

On December 21, the leading cross-chain bridge Multichain announced the completion of a $60 million financing round, led by Binance Labs, with participation from Sequoia China, IDG Capital, Three Arrows Capital, DeFiance Capital, Circle Ventures, Tron Foundation, Hypersphere Ventures, Primitive Ventures, Magic Ventures, HashKey, and other institutions.

At the same time, Binance Labs, the lead investor in this round, also stated that in the future, Multichain will establish a long-term partnership with BSC, which will assist in promoting Multichain and support the bridging of various bTokens across chains.

Looking Back: How Did Anyswap Become the Leader in Cross-Chain Bridges?

A more familiar name for Multichain is Anyswap.

Just a week before the announcement of this financing round, the project had completed a major brand upgrade, changing its protocol name from Anyswap to Multichain, which is more aligned with its business scenario.

With the collective explosion of public chains like Solana, Avalanche, and Fantom, the wealth effect of the new ecosystem has quickly emerged, leading to an increased demand from users for asset cross-chain capabilities.

The direct result of this expanding demand is the explosive growth of cross-chain bridge business volume. Benefiting from this, the entire cross-chain bridge sector has rapidly exploded alongside this wave of public chain enthusiasm.

Among various cross-chain bridge services, Anyswap stands out due to its four main advantages: an early start, broad service coverage, deep liquidity, and low cross-chain transaction fees. Anyswap's business data across multiple dimensions is far ahead of other similar services, solidifying its position as the sector leader.

Anyswap's product officially launched on July 20, 2020. At that time, the Ethereum ecosystem was still dominant, and the demand for asset cross-chain was not as clear as it is today, leaving a significant gap in the entire cross-chain bridge service market. The early launch provided Anyswap with a substantial first-mover advantage, allowing the project to maintain an edge in subsequent ecosystem expansion and liquidity accumulation competition.

In the following year, Anyswap underwent three rounds of key version iterations, evolving its product from a 1-to-1 cross-chain bridging service to a cross-chain routing service that connects multiple chains.

From a technical architecture perspective, the core of Anyswap's business operation is a multi-chain node network based on SMPC (Secure Multi-Party Computation), which employs a multi-signature management scheme known as TSS (Threshold Signature Scheme).

The TSS scheme allows multiple nodes to jointly generate keys and signatures, but no single party possesses the complete key. This means that without the joint consent of other nodes, no node can act maliciously by signing independently, which is the fundamental guarantee of Anyswap's security and decentralization.

Operational Status of Some Anyswap Nodes

The official browser (anyswap.net) shows that as of the publication date, Anyswap's multi-chain node network has a total of 34 nodes, with all nodes' identities, addresses, duration, and operational status publicly available.

Compared to some other mainstream cross-chain bridge services, the SMPC multi-chain node network allows Anyswap to deploy its cross-chain services on all blockchains that support ECDSA and EdDSA (both signature algorithms), without being overly restricted by the contract execution environment. This has enabled Anyswap to gradually become the cross-chain bridge protocol with the broadest ecosystem and token coverage.

Anyswap Ecosystem Support and Related Data

As of the publication date, Anyswap supports a total of 27 blockchain ecosystems, including mainstream public chains like Ethereum, Avalanche, and Fantom, as well as Layer 2 networks like Polygon, Arbitrum, and Boba, which have different architectures.

It also includes parallel chain networks in the Polkadot ecosystem, such as Moonriver and Shiden. In terms of token coverage, Anyswap currently supports a staggering 1,219 cross-chain tokens.

The comprehensive ecosystem coverage effectively meets users' needs for transferring assets across different ecosystems, and Anyswap has gradually become the first choice for many users when executing cross-chain operations. As the user base grows, the liquidity pool of Anyswap is also accumulating.

Currently, the total value of assets locked in Anyswap's smart contracts has reached $5.12 billion, a figure that far surpasses all other third-party cross-chain bridge projects. The large liquidity pool allows Anyswap to handle ultra-large transactions that most similar projects cannot, which in turn has become one of Anyswap's biggest competitive advantages, creating a positive growth cycle.

TVL Growth Status of Anyswap on Different Chains

Compared to other similar projects, another core advantage of Anyswap is its extremely low cross-chain transaction fees.

Multi-Chain Routing Function Test Interface

Taking the most frequent cross-chain behavior of stablecoin transactions as an example, without involving the Ethereum mainnet, Anyswap charges only $0.9 for processing a stablecoin cross-chain transaction, and this fee does not change regardless of the amount of cross-chain funds. When users perform larger stablecoin cross-chain operations, Anyswap's experience is far superior to other cross-chain bridge projects that charge fees based on liquidity comparisons—where the losses due to transaction fees can be staggering.

With these numerous advantages, Anyswap delivered an impressive performance in 2021, amidst a surge of cross-chain bridge projects—total cross-chain transactions exceeded $35 billion for the year.

Looking Ahead: What New Changes Does Multichain Bring?

A closer look at the upgrade from Anyswap to Multichain reveals multiple layers of evolution.

On the brand level, it is evident that changing the protocol name from Anyswap to its current name also clarifies its core business positioning—from a cross-chain DEX to a decentralized cross-chain bridge infrastructure.

On the protocol level, a major aspect of this upgrade is the adjustment of the governance token. After the upgrade, Multichain's governance token will change from ANY 1:1 to MULTI. Since DEX-related functions have been removed in this upgrade, the corresponding token economic model will also need to be adjusted, but this will mainly involve the MULTI that has not yet circulated.

The uncirculated MULTI is locked in a smart contract, with specific uses determined by the DAO. At the same time, the original repurchase and destruction economic model of ANY will be further upgraded to the veMULTI model, with details to be seen in Multichain's subsequent proposals and announcements.

The product aspect is the top priority of this upgrade. In the new front end (https://multichain.org/), Multichain has unified the two cross-chain entry points "Cross-Chain Bridge" and "Multi-Chain Routing" from the old front end into "Multi-Chain Routing."

Old Front End

New Front End

As mentioned earlier, before this major brand upgrade, Multichain had already undergone three version iterations. The existence of both "Cross-Chain Bridge" and "Multi-Chain Routing" in the old front end was to distinguish between different technical implementations that emerged during the version iterations. The former is the foundation of Multichain's services, allowing users to "send" tokens from one chain to another, while the latter is an advanced service that allows users to freely transfer various tokens across multiple chains.

However, for users unfamiliar with Multichain's historical iterations, the existence of these two cross-chain entry points can hinder their usage. In the current landscape where numerous similar services are emerging, if users encounter front-end understanding issues when first interacting with a product, they are more likely to seek out alternative services that are easier to understand rather than digging deeper.

This is precisely why Multichain considered merging the two entry points. In the new front-end interface, users no longer need to understand the specific implementations of different cross-chain facilities in Multichain, nor do they need to make a choice; they only need to focus on their asset transfer needs.

In addition to the experience improvement brought by front-end optimization, Multichain has also significantly optimized the processing efficiency of cross-chain transactions. Currently, the average transaction speed for cross-chain transactions executed through Multichain has reached 100 seconds per transaction.

Finally, we need to discuss a serious topic in the cross-chain bridge sector—security. Due to the inherently capital-intensive nature and the unique complexity of cross-chain service contracts, the cross-chain bridge sector has always been a high-frequency area for security incidents.

On July 12 of this year, Anyswap's multi-chain routing also experienced a hacker attack, where the hacker reverse-engineered the private key of a multi-party computation account through the same rsv signature R value, ultimately stealing nearly $8 million in funds. Afterward, although Anyswap adjusted its code to prevent the occurrence of the same R value, this incident still left many users wary when using Anyswap.

Nearly six months after the incident, during this brand upgrade, we can take a look back at the efforts Multichain has made in terms of security during this period.

Starting with the incident itself, the main cause of the incident was a deployment error in the upper-level code. The underlying business model of Multichain was not impacted, and the SMPC multi-chain node network remains the foundation for ensuring the secure operation of its cross-chain services.

The team also clarified the details of the attack within 24 hours of the incident, publishing an analysis and resolution report to the community to prevent similar issues from occurring again. At the same time, the foundation covered the losses from this attack, replenishing the relevant liquidity.

To further alleviate users' concerns and provide a more reassuring cross-chain service, Multichain has implemented additional safeguards on three other levels: first, it commissioned three leading security companies—TrailOfBits, SlowMist, and PeckShield—to conduct independent audits; second, it established a high bounty program to incentivize the community to actively find and report bugs; third, it set up a security fund to provide guarantees for system operation and fund security in the event of losses due to unforeseen risks.

These concrete actions demonstrate Multichain's responsible attitude after encountering negative events, which may also be the reason why the project can continue to maintain or even solidify its leading position in the sector afterward.

The Multichain Era Has Arrived, and Multichain Will Not Stop

In the development of blockchain, the multi-chain era has always been an industry-level major proposition, but it wasn't until this year that various emerging ecosystems began to bear fruit, and this proposition started to gradually materialize.

The current prosperity of the cross-chain sector is not a fleeting celebration but a tangible development trend that aligns with the major proposition of the multi-chain era. As mainstream ecosystems continue to improve and more emerging ecosystems rise, users' cross-chain needs will continue to increase, and the market space for cross-chain bridges will keep expanding.

As the sector leader, Multichain will not stop here. According to the latest roadmap, in addition to the currently highly mature cross-chain services for homogeneous assets, Multichain will also provide cross-chain services for various NFTs in the future.

In the more distant future, Multichain will go beyond conventional asset cross-chain services and rise to a higher level of information cross-chain, achieving cross-layer contract verification and invocation to enable interoperability between different ecosystems, moving towards the long-term vision of becoming the "ultimate router of Web 3.0."

A few months ago, if someone had said that a cross-chain bridge project could secure $60 million in financing, most people would not have believed it, as such a scale of financing seemed more likely to occur in underlying public chains or leading DeFi projects.

Today, as the prospects for the cross-chain market become increasingly clear, the value of related projects is gradually rising. If we look back one day in the future, this series of recent actions by Multichain may just be the beginning of discovering the value of cross-chain services.