Bifrost is currently one of the largest Polkadot parachains in terms of Total Value Locked (TVL) with over $100M. It also has the largest TVL for liquid staked DOT (vDOT) with over 7.5M DOT ($50M). Bifrost has liquid staking solutions for other networks such as Astar (vASTR), Ethereum (vETH), Manta (vMANTA), Moonbeam (vGLMR), Kusama (vKSM) and Moonriver (vMOVR).
Bifrost offers the following USP due its unique design and architecture:
Finally, given that Bifrost is a dedicated liquid staking appchan it has the following benefits vs. traditional liquid staking protocols which are smart contract multichain deployments:
vDOT - “voucher DOT”, is a reward bearing Liquid staking token (LST) issued by the Bifrost Staking Liquidity Protocol pallet. vDOT represents staked DOT on Polkadot and returns from staking rewards. As staking rewards are received, vDOT increases in value, without any change to the quantity of tokens. Additionally, vDOT allows users to earn staking rewards and participate in DeFi, such as liquidity provisioning on DEXs, and the potential to provide vDOT as collateral on lending/borrowing protocols and for stablecoin issuance as well as restaking for securing decentralised solutions. Finally, as well as being fungible and tradable, the key advantages and unique features of vDOT are the following:
On Bifrost, vDOT will be matched first in a temporary pool for minting and redemption requests before proceeding to subsequent staking management. This matching mechanism allows newly minted DOT to be prioritized for fulfilling redemption requests, significantly reducing the redemption time for vDOT from the original 28 days to as fast as one block (12s) completion. By arranging the on-chain cycles reasonably, the entire process does not affect the timeliness of DOT's Staking management itself. This will greatly reduce the opportunity cost for users participating in staking and help attract more potential users to participate in staking through vDOT.
Bifrost offers a native Stable Swap protocol, which is an improved Swap protocol based on the curve stable curve and more suitable for LST. In general, compared to a regular DEX, Bifrost's stable swap can achieve up to 100 times more efficiency. This will significantly reduce the price impact when users trade vDOT, provide lower slippage, and encourage more users to use the Swap, offering users more liquidity options and helping them achieve higher trading efficiency in the process.
vDOT inherits the foundational infrastructure and capabilities of the Bifrost Liquid Staking stack. Through SLPx (a protocol that extends the basic capabilities of vToken to any chain through cross-chain infrastructure and contracts), vDOT can achieve native stake and unstake functionality on various chain- for further details please check the section “SLPx”. This greatly expands the potential user base and possible use cases for vDOT especially as Hyperbridge and Snowbridge are fesible on asset & message telepoting across different chains and L2s.