The Avalanche-Ethereum Bridge is Now Live

The highly anticipated Avalanche-Ethereum bridge is now fully functional, and ready for use by enthusiasts and developers alike. It utilises a ChainBridge contract, where the transferred tokens are locked. Amongst the relayers securing the bridge are ProtoFire, Meter, POA, and HashQuark.

This innovation is the first step towards migrating the traditional Ethereum DeFi infrastructure to the currently, significantly more scalable Avalanche network.

At present, Ethereum fees, especially for complex DeFi contracts, can easily discourage new users from participating in decentralised finance activities. More specifically, at the time of writing, a simple “fast” token swap on Uniswap costs 0.051375 ETH, or $90.

Even more shocking are the fees on Bancor, where a single-side staking transaction costs almost $700, or exactly 0.392949 ETH.

And while choosing to pay the fee will certainly deduct it from the user’s wallet, the transaction is not guaranteed to complete successfully, as often times instant gas price spikes on the Ethereum network can result in failed transactions.

Meanwhile Avalanche transaction fees rarely exceed a penny and even complicated EVM-based computations could cost less than a dollar. All of them are practically instant, and will remain so at least until the Avalanche network reaches levels of use that are orders of magnitude higher than those seen on Ethereum today. For this reason, the network for the innovative distributed consensus protocol and is viewed by many as a scaling solution, perhaps with bigger potential than ETH 2.0.

Token swap services have already been announced, with Pangolin being close to launch. In addition, seemingly out of nowhere, Zero Exchange was also announced and launched – even before the ChainBridge solution. It is worth mentioning, however, that the latter has caused controversies and is not endorsed by Avalanche developers.