Ethereum bridges boast $7.80B in Total Value Locked at the time of writing, Arbitrum has since captured a 20.7% market share in ETH bridges, running at second place followed by Polygon bridges at 47.6% market share.
Despite the whole market being bearish, $1.45B in TVL is not a small chunk of ongoing economic activity considering L2 adoption is nowhere near mainstream, Arbitrum has proven itself to be a colossal player.
Arbitrum’s organic ecosystem growth is also a sight to behold as they are looking to overtake Polygon at the current rate with very few user incentives at almost 795% growth YoY.
As one of the leading layer 2 solutions followed by the meteoric rise in popularity, it is probably safe to assume we’re going to need to onboard more new users that might not even be familiar with L2s, and bridges will be one of the first few frictions they are going to encounter. Which are Arbitrum’s Top 5 bridges and what do we need to know?
On L2 → L1 withdrawal, there is a minimum of 7 days withdrawal wait time until your funds arrive on mainnet.
Approx. 93% savings on OpenSea transactions compare to mainnet.
https://mirror.xyz/catsmonaut.eth/HEoHcoeIWnTWAIiHiUSW6yOlZOXVIU30ZcnvCm3xcwE
Multichain is an externally validated bridge. It uses a network of nodes running SMPC (Secure Multi-Party Computation) protocol. It supports dozens of blockchains and thousands of tokens with both Token Bridge and Liquidity Network.
The risk of MPC node can be found here.
Crosschain Fee is 0.00%
The estimated time of cross-chain arrival is 10-30 min, cross-chain amount larger than 2,777.78 ETH could take up to 12 hours
Stargate is fully composable across chains, can easily scale to any number of chains, and provides unified native asset liquidity and an instant guarantee of finality for every transaction.
Walkthrough Mode UX is intriguing and might help newbies bridge seamlessly! Also, I found the gas estimator table pretty useful.
Stargate bridging risks can be found here.
Synapse Bridge allows users to seamlessly swap on-chain assets across 15+ EVM and non-EVM blockchains
Bridging funds will take approximately 2-3 minutes once the transaction has been included in a block on the source chain
The Synapse Bridge smart contracts are undergoing multiple audits
Hop is a scalable rollup-to-rollup general token bridge. It allows users to send tokens from one rollup to another almost immediately without having to wait for the rollup’s challenge period.
Hop has announced a governance token (HOP).
Liquidity mining program with some juicy rewards.
Secure communication between different blockchains is challenging because it requires security, trust, or flexibility trade-offs. This means that smart contracts on different blockchains can only be composable by making trade-offs in security, trust assumptions, or configuration flexibility. Hacks have been rampant and time will tell which bridges will stand the test of battle.