Introduction

Since the launch of the Bitcoin blockchain somewhere 2009, a number of other chains have also spun up in a bid to solve some of the shortcomings of Bitcoin. It has also become necessary that different chains cooperate to share assets for the greater good. Like how the Terra blockchain has created decentralized algorithmic stablecoins that are exportable to other chains.

For Terra especially, one way to move coins to other chains is by the Bridge, which is located at https://bridge.terra.money. The bridge facilitates the transfer of assets in and out of the Terra ecosystem. Destination chains supported by the bridge includes Ethereum, Binance, Osmosis, and others via either the wormhole or the shuttle which are two different mechanisms.

For this specific publication, we shall look at flow of UST across Terra and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) via the shuttle.

Flow Metrics

To start, we shall get into the inflow and outflow volumes of UST across the Terra <--> BSC shuttle bridge. Inflows are UST volumes coming in from BSC and outflows are UST volumes moving out of Terra into BSC. In the chart below, we have combined the daily inflows and outflows together over time.

Daily UST volume across Terra <--> BSC shuttle bridge had a steady rise from nothing to millions in the early part of 2021. There was some dip in volume mid 2021 with numbers mostly staying below 5 million UST. In October 2021, daily volumes began breaking out and staying above 5 million for most days. On February 7, 2022, daily volumes peaked at 31.9M.

Next, let's take a look at all these volumes cumulatively to get a higher-level view of the movement. We can see from the chart below that there has been 2.3 billion worth of UST moved across the Terra <--> BSC shuttle bridge since inception.

The next metric to look at is the daily number of users that send UST between the Terra <--> BSC shuttle bridge. We can see that daily users steadily rose over time and peaked at 4,000 + in November 2022. Since them, the daily number of users has been on a decline.

The daily transaction count, presented in the chart below, follows similar patterns as the daily number of users. There is a steady rise, and eventually a peak, and then a decline.

What Accounts for The Decline?

From the charts above, it can be observed that there's some decline in daily user and transaction count. We can attribute the decline to the launch of Wormhole, which is expected to serve the same purpose as the shuttle but with much more destinations and better functionality and user experience. The launch of Wormhole meant that the development of the shuttle ceased and was earmarked to be deprecated.