Major DeFi protocols are moving to cultivate a multi-chain decentralized finance ecosystem, with SushiSwap deploying its contracts on five networks, and Balancer announcing ports onto Moonbeam and Polkadot. 

On March 3, SushiSwap CTO, Joseph Delong, announced the DEX had deployed contracts on xDai, Moonbeam Network, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon (previously called Matic), and Fantom. Delong noted Sushi is planning additional future deployments, including on Optimism. A Solana port is also under consideration.

While the CTO stated users can expect “relatively complete” experiences on Fantom and Binance as both networks currently “have good support for token lists,” the three other networks “will need some work” before Sushi’s full user experience will be available.

Delong also noted the industry-wide trend of “bridges and multichain deployments” as an interim solution while second-layer scaling solutions for Ethereum are still under development:

“These deployments are relatively simple to develop. The industry is currently trending towards bridges and multichain deployments as a middle step before L2 to mitigate high gas costs.”

Delong added that no incentive rewards are currently available for multichain pool users.

According to Dune Analytics, SushiSwap is currently the second-largest DEX with a weekly volume of nearly $3 billion, ranking behind Uniswap’s $6.5 billion.

Sushi is not the only major DEX looking to Moonbeam Network, which offers a Polkadot-powered Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform allowing developers to build interoperable applications.

On the same day, Moonbeam announced the popular DEX Balancer will be working with the Parity team to port its AMM onto their platform.

The announcement noted that Polkadot-based assets will be made available for trade as ERC-20 tokens on Balancer once the exchange has been deployed on Moonbeam.

Balancer is currently the fifth-largest DEX by volume, hosting $525 million worth of trade in the past seven days.

The announced ports have come following record-high gas fees on Ethereum.