Hop Protocol & DAO Q2 24
by francom
Welcome to the Q2 report on the progress of Hop Protocol, the leading crypto bridge focused on enhancing blockchain modularity. In this update, we’ll highlight key advancements achieved over the past quarter, from technical upgrades to protocol and DAO growth.
Usage & Volume Metrics
In Q2 2024, Hop Protocol’s volume has surpassed $5.6 billion. Hop Protocol currently supports transfers between the following networks; Ethereum mainnet, polygon, gnosis, optimism, arbitrum one, arbitrum nova, base, linea, and polygon zkEVM.
The total volume this quarter was a 4.4% increase from last quarter with a total volume of $499 million vs $478 million Q1 2024. The total volume this quarter was higher than each quarter in 2023. Most of Hop’s volume has been in ETH and USDC. The most widely bridged blockchains in Hop Protocol are (in order from highest to lowest); Ethereum, Arbitrum One, Optimism, Polygon, and Base. Hop Protocol’s TVL was roughly $60 Million at the end of the quarter and has continued its downward slide.
V2 Development Updates
The development of Hop Protocol’s V2 is actively progressing, with Authereum Labs focusing on refining the SDK interface for developers and integrators. Recent updates have targeted enhancing efficiency at scale and implementing key V2 functionalities. To facilitate quick deployments and updates, the team has optimized the Readme and documentation for the distributed bonder setup. Progress is being made on the V2 bonder architecture, with imminent implementation on V1 bonders to identify potential issues early.
Additionally, a relay page has been added to the front end, allowing for easy and manual management of incorrect fees or stuck transfers, streamlining the process of handling problematic transactions. Updates to V2-specific logic across various components of Hop are underway, ensuring a smooth migration from V1 to V2 when the switch happens. The V2 explorer and other off-chain tools are also receiving updates, while the implementation of V2 contracts continues.
The SDK is being prepared for upcoming audits and mainnet deployment, with the core team concentrating on simplifying and consolidating contract logic for enhanced security and usability. Updates to token mechanics, the front end, and the SDK are in progress to support V2. The simplified contract side aims to improve both security and ease of use. V2 bonder logic is already running in production, interacting with V1 contracts, and the SDK demo page has been improved to facilitate easier testing for integrators. Overall, improvements in V2 tooling, tokenomics, bug fixes, and optimizations are being emphasized, particularly in enhancing routing functionality across multiple chains. Fresh deployment testing is underway to ensure improved efficiency.
Liquidity
Hop supports liquidity pools in Ethereum mainnet, polygon, gnosis, optimism, arbitrum one, arbitrum nova, base, linea, and polygon zkEVM . The TVL of Hop’s liquidity program has dropped to $19.4 million from $28.4 million with 82.9% TVL being in ETH. DAI (renamed USDS) comes in second place with 8.2% of the TVL and USDT in third with 6.0%. The protocols with greatest liquidity mining TVL are Arbitrum One with 58.1%, Optimism with 15.2%, Base with 12.2%, and Polygon with 9.1%.
The upgrade of the USDC bridge to CCTP has launched and this move supports cheaper and more efficient native USDC transactions and the upgrade to Hop V2. USDC.e has been deprecated.
The list below shows each source chain’s most frequented destination chains during Q1 ‘24
Ethereum > Polygon and Base
Polygon > Ethereum
Optimism > Ethereum and Base
Arbitrum One > Ethereum
Base > Ethereum
According to CoinMarketCap, there is around 64 Million Hop circulating token supply which represents 6.4% of the total token supply.
By the end of this quarter roughly 48k wallets were long term token holders meaning they held HOP tokens for greater than 1 year.
The table below demonstrates that the Hop token’s current liquidity is around $632,171 in various exchanges and chains.
Hop DAO
The number of governance participants for Hop DAO grew this quarter to 1.51k governance participants but the number of active delegates dropped 56% to only 34 active delegates according to karmahq.xyz/dao/delegates/hop.
As the Head of DAO Operations some of my responsibilities include managing the community calls, helping propel the grants program, assisting cross-chain collaboration, and working with delegates in regards to the delegate incentivization program.
During my first term as Head of DAO operations, the DAO & I have successfully been able to;
- Restart the grants program with a new 2.5 Million HOP budget and held new elections to establish the next cohort with the newly elected committee: Rxpwnz, Bob-Rossi, and ChaseonChain.
- Receive a 500k ARB grant for the Hop DAO from the Arbitrum Ltipp Program to be spent on liquidity mining incentives, bonder fees, and bridging rebates (grant team led by Bob-Rossi).
- Hold elections for the next Hop DAO multisig signer group with the new cohort being Sinkas, Rxpwnz, theGreg, fourpoops, and francom.
- Continue the delegate incentivization trial with an increased rewards formula but with vested rewards for 6 months.
- Manage a bi-monthly community call open to the public
Topics for future discussion for the DAO:
- Marketing v2
- Migrating to L2 for Voting
- Token Redelegation.
- Increasing HOP Liquidity