TL;DR
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Because it at the moment stands, transferring ETH to an L2 nonetheless requires a big preliminary price — and if/whenever you need to switch between L2’s, it will probably take as much as 7 days.
Full Story
To know how the conflict of the Ethereum layer-2’s will shake out, we first want to know the connection Ethereum at the moment has with its customers…
If it had been a dialog, it’d go one thing like this:
Consumer: I’ve some Ethereum on a self custody pockets and was eager to ship it over to a layer-2 (L2) community to avoid wasting on charges and…
Ethereum: Say no extra — that’s good of you! That’ll be $50 in switch charges.
Consumer: Wait, I believed these charges had been being waived?
Ethereum: They’re when you’ve ‘bridged’ (transferred) your ETH to an L2 — however don’t fear, when you bridge from a centralized trade (like say Coinbase), it’s dust low cost!!
Consumer: Okay, cool, let’s transfer half my ETH to the trade and do the ‘bridge.’
Ethereum: Good! That will probably be $50.
Consumer: God dammit – so $50 regardless, huh? I’ll simply put on that price as soon as → get to an L2 → and be executed with mainnet transaction charges.
Ethereum: Amen! Proper, so do you need to bridge to Optimism? Polygon? Arbitrum? Loopring? Base? Possibly, Starknet?
Consumer: I don’t know…I imply, I wished to gather a Podcast NFT on pods.media?
Ethereum: Good! They use Optimism. Bridging now.
Consumer: Okay, cool. What if the following platform I need to discover doesn’t use Optimism? If I would like switch to a unique L2 — it’ll nonetheless be low cost, proper?
Ethereum: Completely it can! Although…it can take anyplace between 20 minutes and seven days for the switch to finish.
Consumer: My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.
Excellent news is: these are simply the rising pains of the world’s second largest cryptocurrency!
They’re set to go in due time.
Learn the way, in Half 3…