📝 Editor's Note:

Welcome to OurNetwork's latest covering bridges, a sector which has come a long way since its hack-laden origins. In fact, bridges were the key piece of infrastructure in three of the top five hacks, according to Rekt's famous leaderboard.

However, bridges have become much more secure as all the aforementioned hacks happened in 2022 and 2021. In 2025, no bridge-exploits have even entered the top 100 hacks by monetary value.

Below, OurNetwork contributors dig to some of the biggest players in the more-secure space of bridges — IrishLatte covered Across, Noam Cohen covered IBC, Eloviano covered Staragte, and Damian covered LI.FI, which provides cross-chain infrastructure to bridges.

– ON Editorial Team

Across | IBC | Stargate | LI.FI

• Across, a leading cross-chain bridging protocol leveraging intents, has surpassed $25B in cumulative bridging volume and is rapidly approaching the $30B milestone, with total bridging transactions nearing 20M. Particularly striking is the sudden surge in daily volumes that began in mid-July, where daily bridged volume nearly doubled. This dramatic increase appears to be primarily driven by an integration with Unichain, Uniswap's Layer 2.

• New rollups and even Layer 1 integrations, such as BNB Chain, have shown minimal uptake in bridging volume percentage. This contrasts sharply with Unichain's success, which has recently claimed over 15% of Across's total volume as both source and destination chain.

• Across's user growth rate has been on a decline, though there's a silver lining in the user composition data — approximately two thirds of active users are returning users rather than new acquisitions, indicating strong retention among existing users despite subpar performance in new user acquisition.

• The Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol is a permissionless and free bridging protocol that historically served Cosmos but is now serving Ethereum and will soon expand to other networks. IBC serves over 110 chains, with Noble leading volume and Sei, Osmosis & dYdX sharing a close second, third, and fourth position. Over 560,000 active wallets used IBC in the past 30 days.

• USDC is by far the most commonly asset bridged over IBC when looking at volume, often reaching 90% of daily volume. Other assets like ATOM and Celestia's TIA come close when looking at total transaction count. This shows that USDC, which is natively issued on Noble, moves at higher volumes per transaction than others.

• At $821.98M, the IBC protocol is currently the fifth-leading bridge when looking at 30-day volume. The protocol ranks second however in terms of total transaction with 786,040. The average transfer size is around $1,000, lower than most bridges, which is due to the fact IBC is one of the lowest-cost options currently available.

• Stargate enables fast and secure movement of assets between blockchains (EVM or otherwise) by providing a unified bridge for cross-chain transfers. Since launching in 2022, Stargate has facilitated over 5.3M EVM-to-EVM bridge transactions from 4.5M unique wallets, moving more than $62B in total. (EVM-to-EVM refers to transfers between blockchains that use the Ethereum Virtual Machine, such as Ethereum, EVM L2s, and BNB).

• Momentum for LayerZero accelerated in 2025 — nearly $19B has already been bridged across EVM chains in the first seven months of the year. This is just $1.7B shy of Stargate’s total 2023 volume of $20.5B, its previous yearly record. This puts Stargate on track for its biggest year yet in 2025.

• When looking at the most active bridge routes overall, Berachain to Ethereum leads with $3.8B in volume. Arbitrum-to-Optimism and Optimism-to-Arbitrum follow closely, with $3.6B and $3.5B, respectively. The reason for the near-equal Arbitrum-Optimism flows is still unclear.

• LI.FI is a multi-chain liquidity aggregator that enables anyone to find the best routes for any swap or bridge onchain. One common misconception about interoperability is that it’s a winner takes all landscape. The chart below shows the top bridges by transaction volume across the first week of July are distributed well, with the top six bridges accounting for 89.6% of the market share. In aggregate, the top eight bridges likely get users to the network they want.

• Since integrating Gas.zip last week, distribution of LI.FI transactions have shaken up massively. Out of the past eight days' transactions, Gas.zip accounted for the highest total count at 72.5k transactions, which is equivalent to 25.21% of the market share. The previous top three have also all changed respective places.

• Intent-based bridges are competing hard to offer the best speed and pricing, with new players like Gas.zip shaking things up with tighter spreads and low transaction durations. Taken together, this competition offers users the best UX possible.