Introducing the Finitum Bridge: BSC-Cardano Token Bridge

4 min readJan 24, 2023

There’s currently not that many options for bringing BEP20 assets into the Cardano ecosystem. But there sure is a need.

Yes, we already have such services as Chainport, Multichain, Celer Network and probably a couple more others. But all of them actually only support a very limited number of assets that can be ported over to Cardano. They mostly only support the popular stablecoins, or wrapped BTC. For the rest, we are actually left with no option at all.

Well, now there is! Introducing the Finitum Token Bridge.

How it works

The Finitum Bridge currently works as a custodial token porting service, employing the lock-mint-burn-unlock mechanism.

To bring their BEP20 tokens into Cardano, users lock their tokens into Finitum’s smart contract on BSC. Afterwards, a corresponding amount of Cardano native tokens representing the original, will be minted on the Cardano side.

After receiving their corresponding Cardano native tokens, users can then use them however they like. They can be deposited into DEXes or lending pools, traded, or sent around just like any other Cardano native token.

To bring the tokens back to BSC, users would simply reverse the process. This time, their Cardano native tokens will be burned by the Finitum Bridge and the corresponding BEP20 tokens will be unlocked and transferred to the user on BSC.

Initial Supported Tokens

We will initially support a small list of tokens as we start the service: BUSD, UMB, and our friends’ project — BHC and HPS — whose support was vital to the stake pool’s operation back in our early days.

From here, we look to grow this list of supported tokens; and ideally, open the service up for general use for any BEP20 or ERC20 token.

Why it was created

In our efforts to provide more rewards to the delegators of Staking Rocks! [PHRCK] stake pool, we explored other projects that offered revenue opportunities for operating validator nodes. One project which we participated in, is the Umbrella oracle network.

It is in Umbrella’s roadmap to eventually launch the oracle service on Cardano as well. But as of now, its utility and governance token $UMB is currently circulated only on Ethereum and BSC.

We wanted a reliable and secure way of distributing a portion of our $UMB validator rewards to our delegators on Cardano who bootstrapped our operations. When we checked around for options, we found that there’s currently no way to port $UMB tokens into Cardano.

And we didn’t want to just wait around indefinitely for someone else to offer us a solution, so we built one ourselves! It took about a year of research and work, but here we are now!

Although that was the original motivation for this project, we now intend to keep working on it so that the service can support an even larger list of assets, if we see real demand from the community. It would also be ideal to fully decentralize this service across a network of validator nodes with multiple participating operators.

Why BSC

On one hand, the gas wars on Ethereum has gone way out of control that it has become practically unusable for the everyday user. So it’s hard to expect real user adoption to continue to grow for Ethereum.

BSC on the other hand, is the most widely-used alternative EVM chain, as evidenced by its market cap. So it was an easy choice to start supporting BSC as a source chain to bridge from.

This doesn’t mean however, that we will only ever support bridging from BSC to Cardano and vice versa. As the need presents itself, we will add support for Ethereum and even other chains as well.

What’s Next

We are all about decentralization here on Cardano and the broader crypto space, for the most part. So the next logical step for this project is to turn it into a distributed system that doesn’t have to rely on only one custodial entity.

We just had to build this minimum viable product for now, to demonstrate capability even without external funding sources, and to solve our own problem.

We will also be looking for partners to help us with funding requirements in order to expand this project beyond just porting assets across chains, and into providing liquidity for the ported assets for instance; so that the ported assets can be effectively utilized on Cardano.