blocktribune.com
Bridges play a crucial role in the blockchain ecosystem yet are currently one of the most acute pain points in crypto.
There are over a hundred active public blockchains on the internet, which are akin to isolated nation-states, with movement between chains causing friction for both users and developers.
Attacks on bridges for hundreds of millions of dollars serve as another reminder that cross-chain bridging urgently demands innovation. In response to this, UMA’s bridging solution, Across, a cross-chain bridging protocol enabling decentralized and near-instantaneous transactions between rollup chains and Ethereum mainnet, has today announced a suite of new features designed to solve some of the challenges that are plaguing cross-chain bridges.
Across has already facilitated 12,300 relays totaling over $251m USD between Ethereum mainnet and Layer 2 and the new upgrade will allow users to bridge between more chains, and experience higher capital efficiency, all with Across’ low fee commitment.
“Ethereum’s future depends on its ability to make rollups easy, cheap and safe to use. Our vision for Across is that it will become the one-stop shop for users looking to move between these rollups – this new upgrade is a big step towards that vision.” said Hart Lambur, Co-Founder of Across and UMA.
Across’ new functionality will include:
- L2 – L2 transfers – In addition to transfers between Ethereum mainnet to Optimism, Arbitrum, Boba Network and, newly added chain, Polygon, Across users will for the first time be able to move assets from one L2 to another L2 ecosystem, helping to solve a key pain point of fractured liquidity amongst dispersed dApps, while enjoying lower gas fees, excellent security and speed.
- Just in Time liquidity – Across V2 introduces “Just in Time” liquidity which improves capital efficiency for relayers and liquidity providers. Typically, other bridges need to split their liquidity for each additional chain they support, leading to more slippage and higher fees. Across will eradicate this by concentrating the majority of funds on L1 until they are needed, creating more available capital in those pools and enabling larger transfers. Just in Time Liquidity also provides greater safety for users by pooling funds on L1, thus inheriting the security of the Ethereum base layer and none of the trust assumptions of the other chains.
- Netting- Across’ new design uses “netting” which can make transactions even cheaper when there is a coincidence of wants. . Across will enable this by pairing the coincidence of wants between two users sending funds in opposite directions at the same time. By ‘netting’ off their balances with each other on their respective chains, funds will no longer need to be bridged on Across’ backend, making the transfer much cheaper.