A bridge connecting Avalanche to Ethereum is now live, enabling the two-way transfer of tokens between Avalanche and Ethereum. The Avalanche-Ethereum Bridge (AEB) is an implementation of ChainBridge technology developed by ChainSafe, with Protofire, Hashquark, POA Network, Avascan, and Meter.io securing the bridge as “Relayers.”
With the bridge, users lock Wrapped ETH (WETH), ERC-20, or ERC-721 assets in the ChainBridge contract on Ethereum, and an equivalent token is minted on Avalanche and deposited to the desired address. This asset is now usable across any DeFi apps on Avalanche, and can be transferred back-and-forth.
This infrastructure is vital to enabling Avalanche’s DeFi ecosystem to flourish, while also clearing a final barrier for existing DeFi projects to launch their applications on Avalanche’s blazing fast implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
With a few minor edits to their smart contract code, Ethereum DeFi projects can offer users an alternative platform that solves the biggest issues impacting them today: high fees and slow transaction speeds. Avalanche regularly finalizes transactions in under one second, with fees that are just a fraction of Ethereum’s today.
How It Works:
If you want to use ETH within decentralized applications on Avalanche, you will be able to lock WETH (wrapped ETH) in the ChainBridge contract, and an equivalent token on Avalanche will be minted.
The Bridge can be used either by interacting with apps that integrate the Bridge or with an Avalanche-Ethereum asset swap app (coming soon).
Users of the bridge will only have to send, at most, two transactions to transfer assets from one blockchain to another.
- Approve the Bridge contract for spending the token on Ethereum (using the “approve” method)
- Deposit and lock the approved token to the Bridge contract (using the “transferFrom” method)
- A successful deposit will emit the deposit event to relayers (Protofire, Hashquark, POA Network, Avascan, and Meter.io)
- A proposal is created on the Bridge contract on Avalanche; proposals have different statuses: inactive, active, finalized, and transferred. New proposals are marked as active and contain a hash of the transfer data, preventing the deposit data from appearing on Avalanche before being approved.
- Other relayers will look at the hash and compare it against Avalanche’s data from Ethereum’s data and vote on the accuracy of the supplied data. Relayers will vote.
- If the vote is approved, the token is minted on Avalanche (using the “executeDeposit” method)