The Across Story: Making Blockchains More Usable

Crypto has revolutionized finance, offering a fairer, transparent system accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. However, its multichain growth has created new challenges. 

Today, Ethereum’s scalability solutions, while brilliant, have fragmented the ecosystem into a maze of networks, wallets, and protocols. This complexity is stalling mainstream adoption.

At Across, our mission is direct and ambitious: make blockchains more usable, accessible, and efficient. We are on track to redefine the future of crosschain interop.

Founded in 2019, Risk Labs, the foundation and team behind Across, set out to make financial markets open to all. By 2021, we saw a critical barrier: crypto bridges were too slow and expensive, and the user experience in crosschain transactions was terrible.

We launched Across to fix this, starting as a bridge and evolving into a crosschain interop infrastructure. Today, Across has processed over $22B in volume across 15 million transactions for 3 million users. 

Across is a crosschain engine that makes bridging instant, affordable, and secure for users while enabling developers to create dApps with inbuilt crosschain experiences. 

We’ve also pioneered Intents, a paradigm that allows users to express what they want to achieve, and the protocol then figures out how to execute it. To accelerate the adoption of intents, we collaborated with Uniswap Labs to co-author the ERC-7683 standard, which defines how crosschain intents should be created, processed, and settled. ERC-7683 is now backed by over 70 projects, and Vitalik Buterin has also endorsed the push toward Intents. 

Today, Across works in two practical ways:

Across is available directly to users at app.across.to, where you can bridge tokens across 19 chains within the Ethereum ecosystem, including Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, Hyperliquid, Unichain, BNB Smart Chain, and more. 

Across delivers superfast 2-second bridging for L2-to-L2 transfers with average transaction fees of $0.02 for small transfers (<$100) or about 0.074% of the transaction amount for mid-size transfers ($100–$10K).

Our reliability is backed by a decentralized network of relayers who front their capital to fulfill users’ intents, to ensure that your funds are never at risk during the bridging process.

For developers, Across is a crosschain engine delivering plug-and-play interoperability solutions.  With a few lines of code, developers can embed native crosschain flows right into their dApps; “bridge and stake,” “bridge and swap,” or “bridge and mint.” 

Today, Across powers crosschain transactions under the hood for some of the biggest projects in crypto, including:

Beyond these, dozens of apps and protocols have integrated Across to power native crosschain flows, including crosschain deposits, crosschain staking, crosschain swaps, and many other use cases.

In late 2022, we launched the $ACX token to allow for decentralized ownership and control of the protocol. Since then, $ACX has been listed on major exchanges, including Coinbase and Binance.

In 2025, Across raised $41M in a token sale led by Paradigm with participation from Bain Capital Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, and Multicoin Capital, among others.

Now, $ACX represents more than just liquidity. It represents alignment. It’s how we incentivize growth. It’s how we govern. And it’s how the community can take ownership in shaping the future of crosschain interop.

Learn more about $ACX.

Fragmentation is one of the biggest hurdles to scalable web3 adoption. If we want a truly usable onchain future, we need infrastructure that removes the complexity and puts user experience front and center. We need to empower builders with the tools they need to create better experiences for users.

For developers, we’ll give you the tools to build the best UX in crypto. If you’re a user, we’ll get you where you need to go fast, cheap, and securely. Are you interested in contributing? Join the DAO and help shape the future.