Across | The Cheapest & Fastest Ethereum Bridge

in LeoFinance7 months ago

Across

It's been a little while since I've actually written about a specific protocol, but I couldn't help it with this one. I haven't used an Ethereum-specific bridge in a while, either... I think the last one I used was Connext. Anyway - I had some ETH sitting on Arbitrum from some swaps I did quite a while ago and I wanted to move that to mainnet for easy trading. I immediately went to Connext but I saw the fees and said fuck that.

So after some googling, I checked out the official Arbitrum Bridge... It looks alright, but for some reason it takes 8 days to receive your funds. What the fuck. This is crypto. The land of instant gratification. I need it NOW. So through Arbitrum's official bridge website, it offers 3rd party bridges as alternative. I saw Across right at the top, so I figured I'd give it a try.

The first thing I noticed was that the fee was about 1/4 of what it would have been if I had used Connext. Instead of nearly 0.008 ETH in gas fees, I paid roughly 0.002 ETH. Much better, and it was nearly instant. The fee on the Arbitrum side was about 10 cents, and the fee on the Ethereum side was about $1.60. Not bad at all! I've paid some insane fees for bridging.

Across also allows users to provide liquidity to earn, and even allows you to stake LP tokens to earn. I don't recommend adding liquidity for the soul purpose of yield farming here... I don't really know anything about the ACX token or the tokenomics, so proceed at your own risk. I've had some great experiences with yield farming, and some really bad ones.

If you want to get a share of the ACX tokens being distributed, I recommend participating in the Airdrop instead. Again, I know nothing about it. I just happened to see the details when I was waiting for my bridge transaction to complete. You can earn from referrals and by providing liquidity. Users that met certain requirements before a specific date also may be eligible for the airdrop of ACX tokens. Unfortunately, I was not one of those users.

Before jumping in and using the bridge or any other part of the platform, I highly recommend checking out the documentation on their website. There is always going to be some level of risk when using a service like this, but according to their docs... They use a number of 3rd party relayers guarantee transactions. Those relayers risk their own funds to process transactions, so this should deter any bad actors. There's no way to eliminate them completely, though.

Fees are kept low because Across provides a marketplace for relayers filling transactions. There's competition. The protocol uses an optimistic approach, meaning the relayer fills the transaction up front, trusting only the UMA oracle. The relayer fronts the money to fulfill the transaction, and receives their funds after a 2 hour confirmation period. The period allows time for anything to be disputed, with zero risk to the customer. Once the relayer fills the transaction, they are the party at risk. Pretty cool.

Anyway - just wanted to share this new bridge service I found.

Hopefully you find this useful.

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Gud one to keep in mind. Thank you for sharing. Think many here (on Hive) have moved away from (fee)ethereum, but sum of us do use things here and there.

as much as i prefer Hive, there's a lot you can't really do with it yet. this is why other chains are still important.

Agreed. Why there isn't just one chain. Many have their purposes and are important.

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