Hello everyone! I recently made an announcement at HIVEfest that there are now wrapped versions of HIVE available on three of the biggest EVMs. Today I want to provide a bit more context about the bridges, wrapped tokens and where things are going from here since I consulted on their setup and launch.
What's been done?
Currently there are wrapped tokens that proxy both HIVE and HBD native (layer 1) tokens deployed on three of the leading EVMs: Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and BASE. These tokens are fully minted and the reserves are being managed by the SPS DAO Treasurers as we've already found them trustworthy to key hold and protect over $10 million dollars of assets for the Splinterlands community and many of them are also long-time HIVE community members that are heavily invested in the success of the HIVE ecosystem.
There are bridges deployed on a stand-alone Privex server that is under the control of Hive-Engine, which is another long-time project with a great track record for protecting custodial assets. The initial bridge liquidity was provided by Hive-Engine, they're responsible for handling support requests and they've also seeded an initial liquidity pool on each of the EVMs with roughly $30,000 of liquidity in each.
Please keep in mind, while Hive-Engine is helping manage the bridges, they do not use swap.hive or swap.hbd. These bridges provide a simple and easy to use pathway for native HIVE and HBD to move into and out of proxy tokens on the EVMs while having an established and trustworthy project provide escrow. The fees for bridging are extremely minimal at 0.3% which help to offset gas fees and infrastructure costs.
What's Next?
While all tokens have been minted and bridges are live, only the HIVE to wrapped HIVE bridges are currently operational. Wrapped HBD should be coming in the near future after a reasonable amount of liquidity has been sourced.
I've seen initial strong support from the SPS stakeholders to have the SPS DAO seed a sizeable HIVE:USDC liquidity pool on BASE to help provide easier access to Coinbase for the HIVE community and I plan on exploring whether or not the DAO would like to seed an HBD pool as well, but honestly with 15% APR for simply holding a token it's going to be hard for any liquidity pools to compete with that, at least consistently, unless they're charging high fees, which could limit adoption.
After meeting and discussing the wrapped tokens and bridges with folks from the HIVE core team and getting no pushback, we'll be moving forward with working to legitimize the tokens so that they have icons, are verified and hopefully we can get tracking on CMC and CoinGecko so that HIVE will finally have an official DeFi presence which provides stronger token volumes and access for users that don't interact with centralized exchanges.
I also discussed much of this with the HIVE 
What's are the Risks?
While many steps have been taken to hopefully limit or reduce risk, there is no "zero risk" anything in crypto and bridges are historically the biggest attack vector. There are ways to minimize that risk, but they come with their own trade-offs, such as centralizing control of the bridges. That said, there are still ways to mitigate that centralization and limit exposure to any potential attacks.
For instance, while Hive-Engine may be hosting and operating the bridges, the SPS DAO Treasurers will be handling the reserve wallets. There is no token minting by the bridge contracts which removes one of the biggest attack vectors. Any damage related to a bridge hack can be heavily mitigated by limiting the amount of tokens in the contract wallets at any time. It also mitigates the risk of Hive-Engine controlling the reserves and the bridges, but can the SPS DAO Treasurers be trusted with this responsibility?
Well, the SPS DAO Treasurers have been keyholding 8 figures of assets for the Splinterlands community for going on two years now without any issues and many of them are established HIVE community members, such as Neoxian, Azircon, Jarvie, Bravetofu, Matt Clarke, myself and several others that are major Splinterlands whales, community members and in some cases even Splinterlands team members. It requires 6 treasurers to approve a transaction and they already have experience managing the SPS token reserves on all of the same chains, which hold the entire SPS token supply 3 times over, plus they are easily the most battle-tested when it comes to managing large-scale HIVE multisig accounts.
In short, I trust them, I've been working with them for going on two years to navigate the hurdles of cross-chain multisig reserve management and I wouldn't work with them if I had any doubts they were on the level and could handle this. Whether or not you want to trust them is ultimately up to you, but the track record of the SPS DAO Treasurers speaks for itself.
If you're still skeptical (and hey this is crypto I'm skeptical of everything always so I don't blame you), there's nothing stopping other projects or users from building their own bridges and whether or not you want to use bridges or wrapped tokens is entirely up to you. We've seen no problems with the SPS bridges that have been live for months now, which is the basis for the code used for these HIVE bridges, and so far there have been no issues with the HIVE bridges either.
Liquidity will and should be kept at minimal usable levels and very large transfers can be processed by releasing reserve tokens as needed. If someone wants to wrap a large amount of tokens, they can simply send the tokens to the bridge wallet via the interface, the transaction will enter a pending mode while the contract waits for liquidity and the Treasurers will then add enough tokens to offset the request once 6 signers approve the release of tokens into the contract where they would then be delivered to the EVM address as requested.
Any native tokens above a minimal operational threshold will be locked into the multisig reserve account on the HIVE blockchain to minimize exposure on the chance that the bridge wallets are ever compromised. This will likely cause a delay for very large transactions, but it's better to be safe than sorry. While stringent measures are and will continue to be taken to secure the bridges and their associated contracts, it's always best to proceed with caution and limit any potential damage where possible.
Try Them Here
The token wrapping and unwrapping has its first interface live on TribalDex here:
https://tribaldex.com/bridge
Token Contracts:
BASE token
https://basescan.org/address/0x4cAa77c6E25e08647bC841529D6FA31b71c0DfFA
BSC token
https://bscscan.com/address/0x4cAa77c6E25e08647bC841529D6FA31b71c0DfFA
ETH token
https://etherscan.io/address/0x6b6B78672795d079A3697a987E1DA5cb3D8eAe38
Existing LPs at time of posting:
Please keep in mind that these pools only have about $30,000 of liquidity each, so big transactions will have major slippage. Hopefully we'll see more liquidity providers bolstering the positions and opening new pools soon!
BSC
https://pancakeswap.finance/info/v3/pairs/0xc6391eb39335568df737a1d29403f8e03076ee59
Conclusion
It's exciting to see HIVE finally connecting to other chains and I know from HIVEfest that there are more projects working on helping us expand to a multichain future in different ways as well. Ultimately I think every project that is expanding HIVE's access to other chains and greater liquidity could be a big win for our whole ecosystem. Hopefully you do too! Thanks for your time and feel free to drop questions below.