Why are so many NFT projects bridging to MultiversX?

Recently we’ve checked the stats in the XP.NETWORK NFT Explorer to see which chains have most NFTs transferred to them over our bridge. MutliversX (formerly Elrond) was an easy winner with 3731 transfers – far ahead of Polygon (2,666), Ethereum (1,353), and BNB Chain (1,174).

And yet, the TVL of MultiversX is only $87 million as per DeFiLlama, as opposed to $775 million on Polygon. It is a non-EVM chain not supported by OpenSea or MetaMask, so why is there such a strong interest in moving NFT projects to it? 

The answer is twofold: technology and community. First off, MultiversX has very low fees and is extremely fast. Someone might say that the same is also true about Polygon – but MultiversX also supports NFTs natively, adding metadata on top of standard fungible tokens. In fact, both share the same standard: ESDT, or Elrond Standard Digital Token. 

Issuing new tokens is both easier and more flexible on MultiversX. Users can add branding like a logo and a description. There’s no need to deploy a new contract – only send a request transaction to the Metachain. Addresses can be assigned roles with different privileges, such as burning an NFT or changing its attributes. And since every individual token in the network has its own unique ID, you can assign token-specific roles.

The other reason for MultiversX’s popularity, like we said, is the community. As it’s pretty isolated from the Ethereum/Polygon/OpenSea crowd, it’s been evolving by its own rules and around its own marketplaces. Starting from when the chain was still called Elrond, there was a lot of unique art on this blockchain. 

When a project on a major EVM chain asks us which network we’d recommend them to expand to, MultiversX is invariably among our recommendations. When we bridged the whole Drifters collection from Ethereum, for example, it quickly became one of the top-sellers on Elrond (and still is). The overall liquidity may be lower than on Polygon, for example, but it’s also easier to attract attention and sales. 

Speaking of sales, the largest NFT marketplace on MultiversX (and our partner) is XOXNO. Others include FrameIt and DeadRare. 

You can read about other projects we helped bridge to or from Elrond in these articles:

• OrcPunks 
• Super Rare Bears 
• XOXNO 
• Age of Zalmoxis

About the Official Skully Series

The Skully Series is a collection of 144 hand-drawn characters whose most prominent feature is a skull. There’s a Skully dressed as Wonder Woman, a Darth Vader Skully, Batman, Walter White, and other pop icons.

Unlike most NFT PFP collections, Skullys are all drawn manually. They were originally minted on Ethereum and listed on OpenSea. 

The story of the project began in August 2021 as the work of one digital artist, Daniel Flores (@DeltaTangoMike). Later it grew into a whole #Skullyverse that unites around 10 artists, each with their own visual style but with the same topic – skulls!

The ecosystem also includes merchandise and apparel (t-shirts, backpacks, posters, stickers, etc.), and even beautiful printed calendars. Third-party creators can also apply for licensing to use Skully artwork in their own projects. 

Interestingly, at different times at least five fake Skully Series collections popped up: three on Ethereum, one on Solana, and one on Elrond. Clearly this was a sign of popularity: the creators even had to change the name to The Official Skully Series to distinguish it from all the other Skullys.

However, seeing your collection faked on another blockchain is also a sign that it may be the time to think about going multichain – after all, if the NFT community on another chain is showing interest in buying your artwork, why should you miss out on that revenue?

The easiest way to go multichain with XP.NETWORK is using our widget. It’s a front-end tool that can be easily integrated into any website. It takes only 10-15 minutes and almost zero coding skills: any web admin familiar with CSS will be able to do it. 

The widget allows you to choose which networks to include. If you are just expanding to one other chain, it doesn’t make sense to support all the 30 blockchains that our NFT bridge supports. As XP.NETWORK recreates the full smart contract logic on the destination chain, including royalties, you’ll also be able to specify the wallet where royalties on the target blockchain should go.

The latest version of the widget is also customizable, so that you can style it to match your site or dApp – make the background transparent, for example. 

We’ve even included a fee-sharing feature where a project can earn part of the fees generated by the bridge in exchange for hosting the widget. 

Now that we’ve seen how the widget works in general, let’s see how it operates specifically in the case of Skullys. 

Bridging Skullys to MultiversX

Like many of our partners, Skully Series added a dedicated website page to host the widget. It supports just two networks: Ethereum and MultiversX, with transfers in both directions. This way Skully holders won’t get confused (like send an NFT to BNB Chain, for example). 

The project also included the logos of the two marketplaces where Skullys are traded: OpenSea and XOXNO on MultiversX. 

On XOXNO, we find that the collection has a different name: SkullysbyDTM. This is because the original name has already been used by scammers, so now it can’t be used by the legit project. We’ve encountered this issue before, and unfortunately there is no other solution for it but to come up with an alternative name. 

There are two Skullys listed on XOXNO for now, as the project hasn’t launched a proper bridging campaign yet. Some other projects that use XP.NETWORK, such as Drifters, have bridged hundreds of NFTs – for such cases we have a handy batch-bridging algorithm that radically cuts the costs. Also, note that there is a 10% royalty rate – once again, we can recreate the royalty mechanism as we recreate the whole NFT contract. 

With just two bridged NFTs, it may not seem like a major achievement. However, every case where NFTs are sent from an EVM to a non-EVM chain is important. Ethereum and MultiversX use completely different coding languages and token standards, so you can’t just migrate a collection like you would between two EVM chains. 

It took XP.NETWORK a lot of expertise to loop in so many non-EVM networks, proving that NFTs can flow seamlessly to and from them with minimal fees. This will become important as the cross-chain NFT space evolves: paraphrasing Neil Armstrong, it’s “one small step for an NFT, one giant leap for the industry”.