tk ⛽️@tomkysar
Bridge Review: 2k25 edition
Here's your quarterly update on the state of "what god damn bridge" should I use in the new year. For the sake of this overview, we're going to focus on the following:
Class A: Stargate, Across, Relay, Mayan, and of course, Gas 😘
Class B: Orbiter, Squid, Meson
TLDR: Use Jumper
Class B simply means they occasionally serve a purpose for some more exotic route pairings, however for the vast majority of the time a Class A bridge will overlap the desired route and will be significantly cheaper or faster. The Class A stack should cover 95%+ of the typical bridgoooors use cases.
Stargate: Pretty much has become the best quoting bridge for all majors across tier one and major chains, even for ETH (no burn/mint). It will consistently quote better than Across today for most routes, with the delivery time being ~30s vs Across which quotes about ~10s. If you have the ability to bridge an OFT it becomes a clear no-brainer, 1:1 burn/mint similar to Cricles CCTP with significantly faster delivery times. Stargate also offers a much broader chain offering than its most parallel competitor, Across.
Across: It feels like the only thing Across really has going for it today in the eyes of an user is their ability to quote sub 10 second delivery. However, the larger size you do, the more unreliable this delivery time quote becomes. New chain offerings are very rare from their end, however they get the job done for a bunch of the major routes and will take another bp or two for doing it maybe ~15-20s faster than Stargate.
Relay: Relay really came in and shook some things up this year, and is a happy medium between exotic / middle tail offerings, speed and size. You probably shouldn't be doing size through Relay just yet, pricing isn't that competitive and it eventually caps you at some middle-level amount depending on the route. However, they have a great offering of chains and are definitely the best route for things like OP Stack chains (sometimes even cheaper than the canonical!), some exotics like Solana, Eclipse, SEI and more. Quite fast (average feels like somewhere between 10-15 seconds, even though the explorer tells you different), great chain offering, if you're doing medium/normal size to anything other than the standard OP/Base/Arb this is probably your go to.
Mayan: These guys may be the silent MVP of end of 2024, Mayan is pretty much the best route anywhere for chains like Solana, BSC, AVAX, etc -- where it's not a 1:1 like kind asset swap (ex: ETH --> ETH). Best quotes for Solana by a long margin. You should probably always use Swift, the other one they have can take like an hour, I don't know why its even offered anymore. But Mayan Swift --> SOL, BSC, AVAX, etc is like 10 seconds, best quote, really stepped up this past year and should definitely be your go-to Solana <> EVM route, hands down.
Gas: I don't think I need to shill this any further, but obviously a stupid amount of chains, very fast delivery, always native gas token, bridge to multiple chains at the same time, etc. When Gas becomes a big bridge we plan to, respectfully, give all the others above a real run for their money.
Class B: I'm going to bundle these together, but pretty much you should only really use these if there is a route pairing you really need that nobody else offers. Orbiter and etc excel in the fact they will take an inbound on say something like Morph, which nobody else will do. The downside to all of these (except Meson, they are just a bit slow, but they're actually kinda 'decentrazlied') is that they're expensive as fuck. Flat fee mostly, not shown on your quote until you get the MetaMask popup, etc. You should only be using Orbiter if you really have no other routing choice. Meson is cheap, but a bit slow, but they have a good exotic offering set, along with Squid where they're pretty much your only gateway to the Cosmos world from the EVM.
Honorable Mentions: Symbiosis has become pretty good too with pairings, allowing you to do things like Base ETH to Gravity G natively in one swap. They are a bit expensive, the on-chain cost at least (the system is pretty complex), but they offer some routing not found anywhere else (ex: EVM to TON token on TON natively), have some exotics, occasionally is the best choice for sure.
TLDR Summary: Jumper pretty much aggregates nearly all of these to be honest and you should probably just be quoting through there as the normal average user. This is the best final summary TLDR of the state of bridging. If you care about speed, pick the fastest, if you care about price, pick the cheapest.
Bridging has gotten stupidly cheap, stupidly fast, and stupidly comprehensive in the past year. Its just a swap, there is no need to fear it.
