The Wormhole Token Bridge allows you to seamlessly transfer tokenized assets across Solana, Ethereum, BSC, Terra, and Polygon. It works like a decentralized notary, monitoring the chains for emitted messages and then using these messages to route to other chains. This means, the bridge is versatile. The connectivity doesn't depend on the similaritites between chains. Each chain will hae its own beacon contract, which feed to Wormhole network that is validated by Validators called Guardians. Since this beacon contract isn't dependant on nothing except its parent chain, any blockchain can be connected and any form of token can be bridged, irrespective of its consensus mechanism or structure.

It has been 3 months, since the launch of Wormhole Bridge, which joined the Terra ecosystem with the Columbus-5.In this dashboard or post, we will analyse the Adoption of Wormhole Bridge, the Transition of users of Wormhole Bridge from Shuttle bridge and also, how the metrics hold up post adoption.

In order to understand the significance of the analysis below, you might want to briefly go through my other work on the comparision between Shuttle and Wormhole activity on Terra in this piece. In this piece, I had analysed the major difference between the activity on the two Bridges from the Terra side. Now in this dashboard, we will extensively look at how the transition from Shuttle to Wormhole has taken place, and trends post transition.

First let us look at the adoption trend of Wormhole. This will give us how has the number of new users from Shuttle to the Wormhole changed over time , is it increasing, ranging or decreasing ? How many unique users have used the Wormhole so far ?

Only ~2500 users have adopted Wormhole Bridge. It was launched on Oct 20-21 following Terra Governance Proposal 128 - Enable IBC Transfer. From the graph above, we can see the number of new users saw a massive spike on Oct 20-21 and since then has been ranging.

• The user growth hasn't exploded as the incentives to explore COSMOS ecosystem are fairly low, with ATOM staking, DeFi on SOLANA being the only options for Terra users primarily. For example, Polygon Bridge activity spike with announcement of MATIC liquidity mining. For other chains they have to swap COSMOS assets to EVM assets and so on, hence there is no primary reason to explore the growing ecosystem of COSMOS except for Airdrop hunting or not well established SOLANA DeFi.
• The user growth hasn't fallen off either, as more people come across Wormhole as a trustless way to bridge to other ecosystems, without having to go through a CEX. Moreover, the ability to move assets of Terra as UST is slowing being adopted cross-chain, is seen as a Boon. Moreover, Wormhole is the only option for most chains as Shuttle supports relatively fewer chains.

In my Shuttle vs Wormhole dashboard, we can see that Shuttle Bridge is still the goto bridge for most users. We also saw that Wormhole has reached parity amongst users that have used both the bridges.

Now, let us see how have these users used both the bridges post adoption of Wormhole, i.e, for a given user, we will only consider Bridging activity after their first Wormhole transaction, to gauge Transition of users from Shuttle to Wormhole. This should give us an idea about how the preferences of an user, who has exposed themselves to both chain, and what is their preference. As mentioned above, we know Shuttle is the go to bridge for most users, and Wormhole has reached parity amongst users who have used both, So let us delve into their Post Wormhole adoption trend

Post adoption, an user has prefered Wormhole over Shuttle overwhelmingly. This is impressive comparing to Bridging activity in general shown below. We can see that once adopted Wormhole is the preferred bridge. Now remember that her, adoption implied a given users' first Wormhole transaction. So we can see that trend changes in favour of Wormhole from the very first use of it.

However we are not sure if this trend is concentrated amongst certain users or certain days. In order to check if this trend is widespread amongst Wormhole adopters, we will look at the normalized Daily trends.

Both in terms of users using the bridge as well as number of bridge transactions made, we can see the trend has remained constant since inception. A 75% of all post adoption bridge activity that comes from users who have adopted Wormhole, is via Wormhole.

This data begs the question, are there any users who once started using Wormhole have never used Shuttle afterwards ? The answer is not just yes, but a resounding hell YES.

In the pie-chart above, the first number is the number of bridges used and the second number is the number of users who fall into that category. 65% of users use only Wormhole after their first Wormhole transaction. Now, we have cleanly filtered only users who have used both the protocols, hence these 1501 users are not users who have never used Shuttle in their entire TeFi experience, but are users who have transitioned completely from Shuttle to Wormhole.

Closing Thoughts :

• Wormhole is extremely popular amongst users who have used Wormhole atleast once.
• Asset variety and Destination use cases might be the only reason that is keep Wormhole from explosive adoption
• With LUNA incentives being voted for Avalanche, adoption of Wormhole is only gonna increase, along with UST adoption
• All of a sudden, Wormhole starts to look as a vital component in LUNA success and UST adoption as a crosschain algorithmic stable coin.