About the editor: Spencer Noon is an independent crypto investor & onchain analyst.

• Synapse is a widely used cross chain bridge & inter-chain network. Since inception its 1.53M users (defined as addresses) have done $40B in volume and bridged 2.2M NFTs. Projects like GMX and DeFi Kingdoms use Synapse's inter-chain network to make their tokens, NFTs & apps multichain.

• One notable trend in the Synapse ecosystem as of late: L2s overtaking alt-L1 EVM chains. Since Q3 2022, Synapse has seen more bridge inflows into L2s compared to BSC, Avalanche & Polygon (aka “BAP”). Last quarter, L2s had double the inflows of BAP, which have seen inflow shares go from an all-time high of 62% to an all-time low of 29% in Q2 2023.

• The transaction rate on Synapse has nearly doubled since the start of the year—it is now averaging ~500k txs/month and has registered more than 8M total transactions. The increase in transactions is driven by Synapse expanding from asset bridging to also becoming the native bridge for GMX, Jewel, DeFi Kingdom NFTs and dozens of projects.

• Most L2 projects on Ethereum encourage users to bridge assets via their official bridge rather than third party multichain bridges. As a result, it's useful to observe the deposit activity of users into these new chains via their native bridges. Of particular note this past week: zkSync Era's L1 to L2 bridge made up over 63% of all ETH bridged to L2s via native bridges. This figure is 3x the amount of ETH bridged to Arbitrum via the official native Arbitrum bridge.

• Double clicking into zkSync, its fully-EVM compatible Era commanded over 10x more ETH bridged compared to to zkSync Lite (which is not 100% EVM compatible).

• Finally, across the entire L2 landscape, 118k total wallets have used native L2 bridges in the last week to bridge to various L2s.

• LayerZero is an omnichain interoperability protocol designed for lightweight message passing across chains. LayerZero’s system of Relayers and Oracles passes messages between endpoints (LayerZero contracts on a supported chain) without relying on wrapped assets and intermediary chains. Each action, such as minting an NFT, bringing a token, or synchronizing state across applications, is called a message. LayerZero has done 35m+ messages in under 18 months since its deployment and is now processing 750,000 messages per day. This figure means that more than 2% of all LayerZero’s messages were sent in the last 24 hours (Sources: LayerZero Scan & Internal Analysis).
• Stargate, a fully composable native asset bridge, is LayerZero’s largest application. The project did more than $2.7 billion in total volume last month while also consistently processing more than 160k transactions every day.

• Zooming in on Stargate: According to DeFiLlama, the project also did $1.9b of stablecoin volume in the last month, which is more than 2x the dollar-volume than all other non-native bridges combined.