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Developers
Ecosystem
27 Apr 2023
•6 min read
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If you’ve been following the NFT space, you’ve heard about several well-known collections migrating their communities to new blockchains. Collections are migrating for a variety of reasons, but one of the biggest challenges these collections face is finding a way to do so while maintaining the existing functionality, rarity, and collection attributes of their NFTs. Wormhole has built a standard of cross-chain bridging that enables collections to burn the original NFTs on the source chain and re-implement them on their destination chain(s) in order to maintain the key attributes and functionality of the collection while bringing them to a new audience.
In early March, Dust Labs, the team behind DeGods and y00ts, announced that they plan to move their popular Solana NFT collections to Ethereum (DeGods) and Polygon (y00ts), using the new Wormhole standard to build their bridges.
The migrations began on 3/27/23, over $100M+ worth of users’ assets were transferred via the custom bridges built for these collections, all while maintaining the custom functionally, rarity, and collection attributes of y00ts and DeGods.
The bridging of thousands of NFTs proceeded smoothly, and the migration sites Dust Labs set up offered a seamless bridging process. The experience spoke for itself, check it out:
Bridging these collections allowed DeGods and y00ts to reach broader audiences and communities of NFT enthusiasts across the EVM world. Migrating chains opened up a world of new opportunities for holders, increased exposure, broadened audiences, increased frequency of interactions, and even benefitted supporting products like Phantom and Magic Eden, who saw their largest single-day activation of new EVM users thanks to these migrations.
Dust Labs' move to migrate its communities off Solana and onto Ethereum and Polygon is a significant step towards creating a more seamless and efficient NFT ecosystem - and we at Wormhole are excited to help more projects to do the same with Wormhole’s new Burn and Mint NFT standard.
Given Dust Labs’ goal was to maintain the original functionality, attributes, and ecosystem of both collections, Wormhole's new Burn & Mint mechanism was the best way for the team to implement the migration. Wormhole’s standard prioritizes a technical migration that preserves all functionality of the original collection. While migrating an NFT collection and community may seem relatively straightforward (and the experience is straightforward for holders), the process can be technically complicated and a logistical nightmare.
We considered a number of tradeoffs in approaches toward moving NFT collections cross-chain. The burn & mint mechanism we landed on is the premier method for NFT bridging. Both the DeGods and y00ts bridges were built using Wormhole’s Burn & Mint standard, a protocol built on top of Wormhole's core messaging layer that has two primary components:
Users access the bridges at the designated website, provide an Ethereum (or Polygon) wallet address, and sign a transaction that transfers the NFT to the "burn and attest" contract on Solana. Finally, they receive their newly minted NFT on Ethereum/Polygon directly in their wallet — it's that simple.
The Burn & Mint approach offers several key benefits compared to Lock & Mint:
A) Functional Equivalence
B) Provenance
C) Minimized Risk
The process today looks like the following:
This is how you can get started:
Wormhole is - and always has been - open source: see our Github for more.
If you’re new to Wormhole, here’s what you need to know:
Wormhole is the industry standard cross-chain messaging protocol powering applications across Web3. Wormhole provides developers access to liquidity and users on over 20 of the leading blockchain networks, enabling use cases that span DeFi, NFTs, governance, and more. Wormhole enables a growing suite of products to build on its messaging layer - Wormhole Connect is a key asset layer product, providing developers with an in-app bridging widget that can be integrated in as few as 3 lines of code. The wider Wormhole network is trusted and used by teams like Circle and Uniswap, and to date, the platform has facilitated the transfer of over 35 billion dollars through hundreds of millions of cross-chain messages.
Learn more on wormhole.com.
If you have questions, need support, or simply want to connect, join the Wormhole community and keep up-to-date with our upcoming announcements. We’re always happy to hear your feedback.
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