- Originally published on Jan 7, 2024

We want to start this post by thanking our Rangers for all of their support in propelling Across to one of the most trusted, popular token bridges in Web3 — we sure have come a long way.

Across has had an incredible 2023, full of wins!

Over the past year we were very loud about the many value props that our intents-based design offers bridgoooors, but if there was one thing that CT learned about Across in 2023, it was that:

Many of you will remember how we started the year around 10th place on the DefiLlama bridging leaderboard, but people have caught on to Across and we’re proud to say that we are now consistently in the top 2. We’ve had a lot of achievements this year, and this post is to recap and memorialize our wins of 2023.

If you’re an OG Across Ranger, you will have surely noticed the backend optimizations that resulted in solidifying Across as the most affordable bridge with the fastest transfer times — by a mile. So much so that some have remarked that Across currently offers users a Web2-like experience. The validation proves that our Engineering team was hard at work this year!

We have so many exciting moments to recap in this section at greater detail, but, to start, here are some high-level highlights:

Total volume for Across in 2023 was $2.9B. Daily volume exceeded $10M every day from November 1st onwards.

As mentioned at the start of this section, our Engineering team completed several UI updates that include: A more robust explorer, deposit time + fill time displays on the bridge page, and referral rewards + $OP rebates in the bridge confirmation page.

Last March, we began developing the Universal Bridge Adapter (UBA) to enable Across to support chains without an official bridge to Ethereum, such as Avalanche and BNB chain. It included a mechanism designed to balance the flow in and out of these chains while preserving the core protocol’s benefits. However, implementing this mechanism in practice was met with several technical roadblocks. As ZkSync and Base gained popularity, we shifted our focus to support these platforms based on demands from our community. In the future, we aim to revisit our designs to address the roadblocks met in building the UBA and expand to many more chains in the future.

We are proud that our team was able to deploy a new protocol mechanism called Capital Recycling in 2023, which further optimizes the capital efficiency of Across.

This strategic enhancement enables near-continuous capital reuse by reimbursing relayer funds at a significantly faster rate. The Capital Recycling feature is able to achieve this competitive edge by shortening the challenge window through DAO-elected bundle proposers, greatly improving relayer repayment frequency from 2 hours to 90 minutes (current time), which is continuously decreasing.

One of our absolute greatest achievements of the year came from the members of DART (Data Analytics Research Team), who many of you will be familiar with from our weekly community calls. DART has compiled deep analytics that goes beyond volume data and provides greater insight on things like: Token flows between chains, post bridge actions and aggregator market share. These analytics have helped our team make data-driven decisions to further optimize Across and to effectively market our value props over the competition!

2023 was a big year for Across integrations, here’s a list:

The Across relayer ecosystem has shown the power of decentralized transfer fills with competitive fees and absolutely incredible speeds. We are so proud to report that at the end of 2023, ~80% of Across transactions were being filled by third party relayers. In addition, we had 8 relayers at the start of 2023, which grew to 57 by the end of the year — a 612% growth! These statistics reinforce that Across is truly pioneering cross-chain value transfer with intents and decentralized fillers.

In May 2023, Across DAO went optimistic and integrated the DAO tool, oSnap, which alllows anyone to execute transactions for Across onchain, after they have passed a Snapshot vote. This puts the power to execute governance results squarely in the hands of the community, with a 1-of-n security model that only requires a single honest person to dispute an incorrect proposal. oSnap also allows voting to take place off-chain, which saves voters on gas fees, encouraging improved participation. You can read more about the integration here.

In August of last year, a proposal by the Velodrome team passed to end bribes on Aura Finance and introduce $ACX liquidity + incentives on Optimism. This marked the first time that $ACX was tradeable on an L2. (If you haven’t already — you might want to move your Balancer LP to www.across.to/rewards to receive $ACX incentives!)

Shortly after we had a proposal from Across Treasurer, Kevin Chan, pass Snapshot to improve Across pool APYs in order to attract new LPs. The proposal included suggestions to reduce the maximum reward multiplier from 3x to 2x, but increase base emissions by +50% to improve return competitiveness.

Our Reward Locking revamp initiative sent Across pool APYs soaring, which put our incentives leagues ahead of the competition. To view current rates, please click here.

Remember our “Ape In” campaigns? About a month before their $ARB drop in March, we launched our Ape In to Arbitrum campaign partnering with 20 protocols native to the L2. The hype around the campaign really helped to kickstart the uptick in Across brand awareness in 2023. Impeccable timing!

In 2023, we also had our “Ape In with Aggregators” campaign in May, where we promoted the use of bridge aggregators in the space. Why? Because we’re the cheapest and fastest bridge, and we’re in the top 2 results 98% of the time (on Across supported routes/tokens).

Link to tweet.

Our final ‘Ape In’ campaign was in partnership with Taho Wallet called zkSummer, which hosted 15 zkSync Era-native protocols and ended with 5 integrations, a Galxe campaign with over 200,000 participants and hundreds of thousands of dollars in bridge volume 😎 Check out the Acrosss x Taho x Galxe ‘ZkPlanet’ campaign here (ended).

The zkPlanet, designed by nogland, required participants to complete 16 quests to earn the 16 puzzle pieces which make up the entire NFT.

Around the first half of the year, we started our weekly Discord Community Calls with special guests, weekly check-ins with core team members, playlist-worthy intro/outro tracks and $ACX prize wheel spins!

If you haven’t yet, join our Discord and meet the team & fellow Rangers every Wednesday at 4PM UTC on stage 🎤

Watch this YouTube upload for a preview of our Community Calls!

March 21st, the first day of Spring, was the first 100-day reward locking milestone for Across liquidity providers. ICYMI, Across LPs receive reward multipliers, which max out after 100-days of consecutive staking. As a gift for 100-day stakers, not only did they receive a 3x multiplier on the pool APY, we also airdropped our first 100-day NFT by Everfresh as a special gift for eligible wallets.

Have you ever read the back story of the characters in this NFT? Check the description in OpenSea!

Hablas Español? By popular demand, we proudly launched our Spanish-language blog on Mirror this year. If you haven’t yet, please share with your LATM frens.

We started off the Summer by introducing our Ranger staking badges in collaboration with Rep3, with special platinum NFTs for our 100-day stakers! If you’re an Across LP, you can claim your evolving badge here. We also airdropped our 2nd 100-Day NFT, made by the PFP Queen, Poison Hikari.

The most important community update? Our committee members!

The committee model was introduced to Across Governance to help enable groups of people to contribute to the DAO and the protocol in modular ways. In order for a committee to be formed, they need to define their purpose, scope, and provide regular updates on their work. Since introducing the committee model we have seen the formation of one community support committee, one token emissions committee, and there is an active conversation around a treasury management committee.

Special shoutout to all of our committee members! We thank you for all of your efforts in making Across a world class community.

In 2023 we had Across presence at 7 hackathons with ETHGlobal: Scaling Ethereum, ETHGlobal Tokyo, ETHGlobal Portugal, ETHGlobal Istanbul, ETHGlobal Waterloo, ETHGlobal Paris and ETHGlobal NYC.

We also had 2 Risk Labs team off-sites in 2023, where the UMA and Across teams got together to tackle some of the hard problems in interop and build in person. The first was in Portugal during the first half of the year and the second was in Mexico City in December, where we were able to celebrate Across’ 2nd birthday!

Happy 2nd birthday to $ACX!

Across has had a WILD year and it is really thanks to you Rangers who have been supporting and cheering for us along the way. We have proven that optimizing the bridging experience in price, speed and putting user security at the forefront will win the cross-chain race. Our intents-based design has caught the attention of the crypto space, and we can’t wait to see what the next cycle, the cross-chain cycle, does for Across.

You’re not going to want to miss what we have in store for 2024! Our roadmap will be public soon…

Across Protocol is an intents-based interoperability protocol, capable of filling and settling cross-chain intents. It is made up of the Across Bridge, a powerfully efficient cross-chain transfer tool for end users, Across+, a chain abstraction tool that utilizes cross-chain bridge hooks to fulfill user intents and Across Settlement, a settlement layer for all cross-chain intent order flow. As the multichain economy continues to evolve, intents-based settlement is the key to solving interoperability and Across is at the core of its execution.

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