Conflux, a public blockchain endorsed by the Shanghainese government, is launching a cross-chain bridge to facilitate easier operations among three of Asia’s largest crypto exchanges – Binance, OKEx and Huobi – as well as Ethereum. 

The cross-chain bridge, called ShuttleFlow, will enable digital asset swaps between and across the Conflux network, Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Huobi ECO Chain and OKex Chain, the firm announced Tuesday. In other words, a user can take an asset on one of these networks and convert it into an asset on a different one. 

The ShuttleFlow solution is the first cross-chain bridge to support Asia’s most widely used digital asset exchanges, according to a press statement shared with CoinDesk.

“The name ‘ShuttleFlow’ means allowing assets to flow between multiple public chains as freely as water,” Eden Dhaliwal, global managing director at Conflux, told CoinDesk via an email.  

Increasingly more crypto firms are coming up with cross-chain liquidity and interoperability solutions for decentralized finance (DeFi). Earlier this month, decentralized liquidity network Thorchain launched cross-chain trading of cryptocurrencies. In March, Alameda Research invested $20 million in cross-chain DeFi platform Reef Finance.  

ShuttleFlow’s multi-chain capabilities are twofold, Dhaliwal explained. First, it provides decentralized app (dapp) developers with solutions to integrate multi-chain asset deposits and withdrawals at a low cost, he said. 

“As a project, the Conflux Foundation has historically covered all or most of the Ethereum gas fees associated with transactions, in order to facilitate the onboarding of new users who typically experiment with lower dollar amounts,” Dhaliwal said, adding that now, dapps building on Conflux can sponsor transactions with their own CFX (Conflux's native token), or open it up as a donation and let users cover the gas fees. 

Since the launch of the mainnet, there have been over 5 million transactions with a combined gas cost of just $90 across the entire chain, Dhaliwal added.

Second, ShuttleFlow uses the Conflux Network as a “transit chain” to build asset bridges and other related infrastructure across DeFi blockchains, Dhaliwal said. This means the solution can facilitate swaps directly between two external blockchains like Ethereum and Binance, according to the statement shared with CoinDesk.  

A testnet version of ShuttleFlow was launched in the first quarter of 2020, supporting over 49 assets including bitcoin and ether, the statement said. In September 2020, the first cross-chain multi-asset migration of digital assets (worth over $7.6 million) was completed. 

Since then the ShuttleFlow protocol has moved over $120 million in assets, Dhaliwal said.