The Orbit Bridge is now live on mainnet sandbox and developers
can interact with the bridge.The new bridge builds on the success of the
Satoshibles NFT bridge, which is purpose-built to allow NFTs to move back and forth between Ethereum and Stacks. A more typical bridge, the Orbit Bridge instead allows for the movement of fungible tokens back and forth between networks. This opens up interesting possibilities for Bitcoin DeFi in a couple of main ways:
1. Users on other chains can bridge assets into Stacks to access Stacking or other Bitcoin DeFi protocols like ALEX or Arkadiko. Other networks can now access novel funding and yield-bearing features that can leverage and settle down to Bitcoin. For fungible tokens, users can bridge them over and potentially Stack them to earn yield. This potentially helps derisk investments as users recoup their principle in BTC.
2. Stacks holders can bridge their STX to more easily participate in other popular DeFi protocols, opening up the utility of Stacks even further.Any SIP-based token could be instantly paired with the chosen ecosystem token standard. These native token pairs allow projects built on Stacks such as
ALEX,
DIKO,
STSW or others to become composable with almost all apps in the selected ecosystem, making it much more attractive for developers to push Bitcoin DeFi.
In the future, we expect bridges to and from Stacks to give other networks interesting and novel ways to interact with Bitcoin via the Clarity smart contract language and to see further activation of Bitcoin capital via the Stacks network.
What’s next?The majority of the integration work for the main bridge is complete, so the Ozys team, who drives Orbit Chain and Bridge development, is turning their attention to enabling interoperability for Stacks-based tokens including ALEX, DIKO, STSW, and all following the
SIP-010 standard.