Burn-and-Mint
A cross-chain bridging mechanism that permanently destroys tokens on the source chain and creates an equivalent new supply on the destination chain.
Burn-and-mint is a cross-chain bridging mechanism in which tokens are permanently destroyed (burned) on the source chain, and an equivalent amount of tokens is newly created (minted) on the destination chain, rather than locking the original tokens in place the way a lock-and-mint (see Kaavon's "Lock-and-Mint" glossary definition) bridge does. Because the original tokens are destroyed rather than held, there's no locked reserve sitting on the source chain that could become a concentrated target for an exploit.
Burn-and-mint is typically used for a token that's natively designed to exist across multiple chains, where each chain's supply is managed through burning and minting rather than treating one chain as the canonical original and all others as wrapped derivatives. The tradeoff is that this mechanism requires the token's own protocol — and whatever system validates burns and authorizes corresponding mints — to be trusted and secure, since a flaw in that validation layer could let someone mint new tokens on one chain without a genuine matching burn on another.
Examples
- A multi-chain native token might use burn-and-mint so that moving it from one chain to another destroys the original supply and creates an equivalent new supply, rather than locking tokens in a bridge contract.
- Unlike lock-and-mint, burn-and-mint doesn't leave a large locked reserve on the source chain as a concentrated target for attackers, but it still depends entirely on the security of its burn-and-mint validation process.