$UST bridged through native Terra Bridge vs Wormhole

Wormhole is not the first bridge that supports Terra<>Ethereum transfer. Terra's native bridge, Terra Shuttle Bridge (uncool name, Wormhole is cooler 😤) has been around since Terra's initial day in December 2020. Wormhole are much younger compared to TB. TB has close to 12B $UST cumulative volume transacted to Ethereum in close to 2 years while Wormhole has 4.3B $UST. Terra Shuttle (TS) also has much higher daily volume compared to Wormhole most of the days; EXCEPT for the past week. However, Terra has announced that it will deprecate its Shuttle Bridge in favor of Wormhole.

Ethereum is the first smart contract platform and still the most popular nowadays. According to illustration below (source: defillama), over 50% of all TVL of all DeFi is in Ethereum network.So, $UST adoption across Ethereum chain will be an important milestone of $UST and Terra.

Total $UST outflow (Terra > other chains)

First of all, let's take a look at the cumulative volume outflow and transaction count of $UST from Terra to all other chains through Wormhole. We almost crossed 6B $UST and 50k distinct transactions bridged through Wormhole since the bridge went live on Terra in October 21.

Now we take a look at total $UST outflow chain destination. Iniatially, Solana was the main destination chain then overtook by Ethereum. Initially, Wormhole was developed on Solana which is why it has most volume initially. Now, total of 4.3B $UST went to Ethereum and Solana, which ranks second and has 3.5x less volume than Ethereum. But, Solana has much higher transaction counts. Ethereum is fifth in transaction count after Solana, Avalanche, BSC and Polygon which shows that how accurate Ethereum is potrayed as rich people's network of choice.

Wormhole (now Portal is the bridge's name) is a multi-chain bridge across multiple chains. As seen in snapshot on Portal as below, Wormhole now support 9 different chains. So any two of the listed chains can be used to transfer asset between them.

Graph below shows the daily $UST outflow volume to all chains through Wormhole. Most of the days, Ethereum is the main destination of $UST out from Terra.

Terra<>Ethereum through Wormhole.

This part will show the volume, transaction and daily users count for $UST inflow and outflow from Terra to Ethereum. Some notes;

INFLOW: $UST from Ethereum to Terra network

OUTFLOW: $UST from Terra to Ethereum network

First, let's see the daily volume of inflow and outflow and their respective cumulative volume. The total volume outflow (4.3B $UST) is significantly more compared to inflow (3.6B $UST) which is why on daily nett volume, we can see that outflow overweighs inflow. It is quite surprising to see quite high inflow into Terra but this could also means that many Ethereum users bought ERC-20 Wrapped $UST then bridged to Terra.

Graph below shows the daily transaction count and unique users count of outflow and inflow. Recently, outflow transactions and unique users has increased comparably to inflow transactions.

CONCLUSION

Wormhole is a multi-chain bridge that has helped to accelerate $UST adoption across other layer-1 blockchain such as Ethereum, BSC, Avalanche, Fantom etc. Soon, we will see most of swap pairs on DEXes on other chains will also be denominated in $UST. We has seen that the inflow volume is quite significant. This shows the closed-loop cycle of demand native to Terra and Wormhole is the cross-chain medium that helps realize the $UST movement and mass adoption.