David Angliss, an analyst with Australia’s leading cryptocurrency investment firm, Apollo Capital, shares the fund’s weekly take on what’s happening in the fast-changing and volatile cryptocurrency space.

Even with the crypto crash, Ethereum has had an incredible run over the past year and a half. But it’s also been losing market share to speedier and less expensive smart contract platforms. The future is looking more and more multichain.

“Essentially, one of the big narratives for 2022 is going to be interoperability across (block)chain protocols — protocols that facilitate communication amongst all the different blockchains,” David Angliss says.

The market leader in this space, Angliss says, is Multichain, the cross-chain router formerly known as Anyswap.

“It’s not a massive protocol, meaning there’s definitely growth potential as these blockchains expand out, grow in TVL (total value locked) and DeFi grows across the whole crypto-asset ecosystem.

Multichain is Apollo’s favoured cross-chain router protocol apart from Aussie-founded, Berlin-based rival project Chainflip, which Apollo invested in during an early-stage deal, Angliss says.

(For readers who are new to crypto, a few lines of explanation. Crypto tokens exist on different blockchains platforms, like Ethereum, Avalanche or Binance Smart Chain. A customer might use Multichain to transfer, say, their USDC stablecoins from one of these chains to another.)

Multichain facilitates over US$500 million in daily cross-chain token swaps across 30 different blockchains, and has a total value locked in excess of $10 billion, Angliss says.

On Friday it had generated US$283,000 in fees in the past 24 hours by facilitating US$1.42 billion in cross-chain transfers. More than 13,000 users had used it for 22,352 different transactions in the past 24 hours

“They’ve gotten a massive surge in Fantom, because Multichain is very closely associated with (DeFi architect) Andre Cronje, who’s one of the key individuals involved in Fantom,” Angliss says.

“They’ve got the highest TVL as well… so they’ve got a good first-mover advantage in that cross-chain router, protocol space,” Angliss says.

While cross-chain bridges are considered a risky area of DeFi for security reasons, Multichain/Anyswap has been audited by TrailOfBits, SlowMist and PeckShield, Angliss said.

Right before Christmas, Multichain announced it had completed a US$60 financing round valuing the project at US$1.2 billion. Binance Labs led the capital raising, joined by Sequoia China, Three Arrows Capital, DeFiance Capital, IDG Capital, Circle Ventures, Tron Foundation, Hypersphere Ventures, Primitive Ventures, Magic Ventures and HashKey.

Coinmarketcap on Friday listed the ANY token as the No. 224 crypto with a market cap of US$378 million.

“I think for Multichain to compete for a space in the top 100 would not be too unrealistic for 2022, the way the DeFi market is headed, and the growth of alternative layer ones, which Multichain supports,” Angliss says.

The views, information, or opinions expressed in the interview in this article are solely those of the interviewee and do not represent the views of Stockhead.

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