Today, Orion Protocol, the decentralized gateway to the digital asset market, launched Orion Bridge: the first ‘truly decentralized’ peer-to-peer atomic swap bridge, and ‘the most secure cross-chain bridge in market’. Orion Bridge is the first bridge to be integrated into a trading platform: enabling cross-chain, cross-exchange liquidity aggregation on Orion Terminal, and almost zero fee trading of popular ERC20 assets.

The Race Towards Interoperability

We have reached a point of peak fragmentation of the digital asset market – with increasingly different asset types, built on different blockchains, held across different exchanges – resulting in incredibly siloed pools of liquidity, without any infrastructure to bridge them together. The industry is still too siloed to evolve to a state of full-interoperability that is needed for mainstream adoption without a solution, a chain-agnostic meta-aggregator, that sits across the entire market.

Unrivaled Security

Cross-chain bridges like Multichain are increasing in popularity, volume and TVL as the space makes strides towards cross-chain interoperability. Yet at the same time, we’re seeing many cross-chain bridges succumb to hacks and exploitation – Qubit and Multichain were both exploited in the last fortnight alone ($80 million and $4 million respectively).

The specifics vary, but both exploits ultimately come down to one thing: the need for wrapping and minting of assets. Cue Orion Bridge, the first truly decentralized cross-chain bridge powered by peer-to-peer atomic swaps: enabling users to trade native Layer 1 assets across different blockchains without limits, delays, refused orders, blocked funds, or exploits. Built by Orion Protocol, the decentralized gateway to the digital asset market, the bridge has been integrated into Orion Terminal to enable seamless cross-chain, cross-exchange liquidity aggregation for the first time.

The first Atomic Swaps

While a well-known concept in the community, atomic swaps are implemented in very few projects. The first bridge to use atomic swap technology, Orion Bridge enables immediate exchange of two native assets on different blockchains, without wrapping or minting assets. The operation is called atomic because it implies that the whole procedure cannot stop halfway – the exchange either occurs completely and both parties receive their exchanged assets, or it does not occur at all and both parties retain ownership of their existing assets. As such, neither party can exploit any stage of the transaction, and thus Orion Bridge cannot be exploited in the same way as the likes of leading bridges.

Peer-to-Peer: True Decentralization

Furthermore, most bridges are not truly decentralized; most are dependent on layers of validators and therefore susceptible to 51% attacks. Alternatively, the peer-to-peer technology underpinning Orion Bridge enables true decentralization: the direct exchange of an asset between individual parties without the involvement of a central authority. With transactions recorded on every peer’s network, it is extremely difficult, even “computationally impractical”, to overwrite or falsify ledgers. There is no central server or host, making Orion Bridge highly resistant to attacks, while making it infinitely scalable. The more users joining Orion Broker Network, the more resilient and scalable the bridge becomes.

Integration into Orion Terminal

2021 was the year of crypto adoption – from the explosion of NFTs amidst retail through to the adoption of Bitcoin by El Salvadore as legal tender. Yet 2021 was also the year the market saw gas fees surge on Ethereum, rendering it nearly unusable ahead of the much-awaited ETH 2.0 (now Ethereum Consensus Layer).

While cross-chain bridges are growing in popularity, no bridges have been integrated into trading platforms for true cross-chain trading – until today. Orion Bridge has been integrated into Orion Terminal, enabling true cross-chain and cross-exchange liquidity aggregation for the first time: the first step in marketwide interoperability. As a result, users can trade popular ERC20 assets, with the low fees and high speed of Binance Smart Chain. Other chains will be integrated to reduce fees further, while increasing speed, asset availability, and more.

The First Step in Marketwide Interoperability

Orion Bridge V1 is positioned as the first step towards true marketwide interoperability. Atomic swaps are a powerful continuation of the idea of “removing” the boundaries between blockchains, and as the first bridge to implement atomic swap technology, Orion will integrate further chains and exchanges, with plans to move all transaction settlements to a cheap network in a way that remains transparent to users – finally removing the boundaries between blockchains.

“As Orion Bridge grows to include more assets and chains, and as other bridges sadly continue to succumb to exploitation, Orion Protocol plans to become the leading cross-chain bridge in the market, finally removing the boundaries between blockchains. Our goal is to enable users to trade any asset across any chain – without limits, delays, refused orders, blocked funds, or exploits,” says Timothea Horwell, CMO of Orion Protocol.

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