Fusionist, a platform for onchain gaming, has launched the first Circle-compliant Bridged USDC bridge to their Endurance chain, powered by a permissionless deployment of Hyperlane.
Try out the bridge here: bridge.fusionist.io
Bringing in liquidity is a challenge to a new chain, so how can chain builders move fast to enable users to bridge in and out without bottlenecks And what are dev best practices for bridging USDC to your chain?
Read on to see how Fusionist used Hyperlane Warp Routes to solve this:
Permissionless Bridging for Gaming
Fusionist is a platform for onchain gaming, with a multi-game universe that has shared community and assets. Its home is the scalable EVM chain Endurance. Fusionist’s team faced that bridging challenge and began investigating interop options, a journey they documented in their engineering blog.
They found many of the other interop protocols have a long, centralized process to onboard a new chain and especially don’t focus on “smaller” chains.
In addition, as experienced crypto protocol developers, they wanted to use open source in their stack and have more transparent trust assumptions about bridging security. Hyperlane’s open interop framework and self-serve CLI & docs experience allowed them to meet their needs.
Circle’s Bridged USDC
One of the most common requested assets for liquidity is stablecoins, and Fusionist’s research led them to Circle’s Bridged USDC Standard. Essentially it’s a specification for a chain builder to deploy Circle-compliant USDC to their chain. It comes with a number of benefits:
- Circle is a permissioned minter, which enables the ability to transition from Bridged USDC to official USDC in Circle’s CCTP network
- Allows chain builders to give permission to different 3rd party bridges, like Hyperlane, to mint the same fungible Bridged USDC token (a contract called
FiatToken), avoiding fragmentation
Enabled by Hyperlane Warp Routes
Hyperlane Warp Routes allow developers to permissionlessly create token bridges, including for special types like Bridged USDC.
Warp Routes supports this Bridged USDC spec — the Collateral here is the official Circle-backed USDC on one of the chains Circle supports, and Circle’s FiatToken token standard is minted on Fusionist’s chain.
The interface to a typical Warp Route contract is primary a contract call to transferRemote that includes the amount of tokens, destination chain, and recipient’s addresses. With Bridged USDC through Warp Routes, the interface is extended to also include additional minter design considerations because of Bridged USDC’s multiple permissioned minter design.
Bridged USDC Warp Routes have first class support throughout Hyperlane’s stack including tooling — the SDK, CLI and the Warp UI template — and the Relayer.
How Fusionist Crafted it
Fusionist wrote a dev blog post with details about their experience.
First, Fusionist set up the FiatToken on their chain by following Circle’s contract deployment guide.
Next, Fusionist requested on the Hyperlane Registry for Endurance chain to be added to Hyperlane’s network. As a public good, Hyperlane core dev team Abacus Works deployed Mailbox contracts and operates a Relayer to Endurance.
Then they used the Hyperlane CLI’s warp init and warp deploy commands to setup a collateral to collateral bridge between USDC on Arbitrum and Endurance. They created a Collateral contract for locking the Official USDC on Arbitrum, and they wrapped the previously FiatToken on Endurance in a collateralFiat. This way, USDC can be bridged directly from Arbitrum to Endurance, while also complying with the Bridged USDC standard.
Lastly, Fusionist was able to deploy a Warp UI using the out of the box Warp UI template. They plugged in their warp route config, customized their styling, and deployed to Vercel.
What Can I Do Now?
The Fusionist bridge to Endurance is live. Congrats to these permissionless builders! Bridge here: bridge.fusionist.io
For a full walkthrough of how to bridge, check out Fusionist’s guide: https://medium.com/@fusionistio/usdc-cross-chain-bridge-instructions-65ef416cbd5b
To self-deploy Hyperlane for bridging like Fusionist, visit the docs: https://docs.hyperlane.xyz/docs/deploy-hyperlane
More about Hyperlane
Hyperlane is the open interoperability framework. It empowers developers to connect anywhere onchain and build applications that can easily and securely communicate between multiple blockchains. Importantly, Hyperlane is fully open-source and always permissionless to build with.
