Blockchain bridges work essentially similarly to physical bridges, they connect one point to another point. A blockchain bridge is a tool that lets you port assets from one blockchain to another, solving one of the main pain points within blockchains – a lack of interoperability.

This means that if you use a bridge to send one Solana coin to an Ethereum wallet, that wallet will receive a token that has been “wrapped” by the bridge – converted to a token based on the target blockchain. In this case, the Ethereum wallet would receive a "bridge" version of Solana that has been converted to an ERC-20 token – the generic token standard for fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.

Read more about blockchain bridges from Ethereum Foundation.

Bridges have recently captured my attention during this bear market as different chains are going into building mode, it is the perfect time to experiment with the different ecosystems while the gas fee is at an all-time low, and bridges are going to be one of the first entry points to the other chains. UX of bridges is however still quite fragmented, there are a few pain points that needed to be tackled especially on native bridges for example:

• Technical jargons are still all over the place

• The assumption that users only have a single wallet, making switching between wallets a pain in the ass

• The need for emphasis on universal mental mode for a currency of references

• Waiting or settlement time not communicated explicitly

• Not responsive

Recently, we’ve talked briefly about bridges in Arbitrum. Let’s take a look at one of the bridges and investigate how might we further improve its UX, this time on Arbitrum’s Native Bridge.

Do note that this analysis doesn’t take into account the team’s roadmap or relevant user’s data and are mostly based on potential usability issues for newcomer or less advanced user’s point of view.

I found the inability to access the UI without connecting your wallet to be a major annoyance especially since hackers have stolen $1.4 billion this year using crypto bridges and we as users want to be really careful when it comes to connecting our wallets.

While connecting a wallet isn’t at all dangerous in comparison to signing a transaction, there is almost no reason to allow this restriction and just to see what the bridge has to offer before connecting.

Potential solution: Enable bridge UI without wallet connection so we as users understand which blockchains are these bridge connecting to, what tokens can be transferred, etc.

Based on the documentation on L2 → L1 withdrawal, there is a minimum of 7 days withdrawal wait time until your funds arrive on mainnet. This is critical information that could have been communicated in the summary section especially if there are certain expectations from anyone that are used to L1 settlement duration.

In my opinion, anything that could potentially affect users’ funds needs to be communicated as clearly as possible when it comes to this space where trust is at an all-time low.

Potential solution: Adding bold label to put emphasis on wait time information so we as users understand that we might not receives our funds right away and are able to weigh in the risk before executing this transaction.

Chain selection is minuscule in this particular bridge, dropdown is probably not needed.

Potential solution: Deprecate dropdown and opt for selection and to put more emphasis on which chain users are sending from/to to help further reduce potential transaction mistakes.

L2s are in the race to keep the transaction cost down, Arbitrum provides a page where you can enter a transaction hash and it will calculate how much you’re saving if you are transacting in Arbitrum instead.

This is handy but, it requires the user to go to another page, find a transaction hash from probably Etherscan, and then go back to this page. Adding a lot of interaction costs just to communicate that they are saving 99% transaction cost.

Unless the saving ratio is highly dynamic with a big margin of differences, I feel this is unnecessarily complicated.

Potential solution: Adding data table for transaction costs just to compare between chains or other relevant comparisons. Stargate has an amazing data table that I personally really like.

As mentioned earlier, bridges experiences are still fragmented across chains and we’ll be experimenting with other chains as well and continuously help the industry iterate. Thanks for taking the time to read, hit us up on twitter @catsmonaut_eth for further collaborations!