Ahhhh... a weekend away, and a few moments to tidy up some little amounts that I had put on various Ethereum mainnet to L2 bridges.... and gas fees are pretty damn low at the moment, at around 3 gwei and 0.01 tip, which makes for pretty fast and cheap transactions on mainnet... and the various L2 sides are always fast and cheap!

Anyway, it is hard to believe that we have relied on 3rd party and canonical bridges to get from Ethereum to L2s... and for quite a while, there were only the canonical bridges which meant that everything had to go via mainnet during the Ethereum high fee times. Thankfully, with the 3rd party bridges, we could go from L2 to L2... and that reduced latency AND costs... BUT it came with the huge risk that these bridges were gigantic honeypots of crypto that were just waiting to be exploited... plus, it was horribly capital inefficient, as giant pools of crypto were just sitting around doing mostly nothing. But without the large pools, the slippage would just be intolerable.

Anyway, before Ethereum staking and restaking became a thing, it was pretty much one of the safer ways to earn some return on ETH... if you didn't mind taking on the contract and honeypot risk! However, as more and more teams start to get exploited by some seriously dedicated state actors acting over long time-frames... well, it starts to get really risky to have anything sitting in these pools. And teams that have gotten exploited have started to include some pretty serious teams with decent enough security, not just the regular crypto fly by nights... it does start to get quite worrisome.

Ethereum has been developing cross chain intents for about a year or two... and Uniswap had a version of it on their UniswapX... basically, instead of having pools of capital sitting in a contract on the two chains... you broadcast an "intent" (with fee/price constraints) which will then be opened up to "fillers" on either side to complete (with a fee and a price). It is a much more elegant system with no need to have pools sitting idle.

With the launch of Unichain... well, Across Protocol will be their intents provider... and I think that this pretty much means that the days of liquidity pools as we know it will be at an end! Of course, there might be ways to deposit to pools that are accessible by intent fillers, but I'm really looking forward to the end of cross-chain bridges.

Anyway... that means that I have a bit of cleaning up to do... I think I have little bits here and there to remove from bridges... and I will have to keep an eye out on how Uniswap and Across Protocol will start on implementing their intents!

Handy Crypto Tools

Ledger Nano S/X: Keep your crypto safe and offline with the leading hardware wallet provider. Not your keys, not your crypto!
Coinbase Wallet: Multi chain wallet with lots of opportunities to Learn and Earn!
Binance: My first choice of centralised exchange, featuring a wide variety of crypto and savings products.
WooX: The centralised version of WooFi. Stake WOO for fee-free trades and free withdrawals! This link also gives you back 25% of the commission.
GMX.io: Decentralised perpetual futures trading on Arbitrum!
Coinbase: If you need a regulated and safe environment to trade, this is the first exchange for most newcomers!
Crypto.com: Mixed feelings, but they have the BEST looking VISA debit card in existence! Seriously, it is beautiful!
CoinList: Access to early investor and crowdsale of vetted and reserached projects.
Cointracking: Automated or manual tracking of crypto for accounting and taxation reports.
KuCoin: I still use this exchange to take part in the Spotlight and Burning Drop launches.
MEXC: Accepts HIVE, and trades in most poopcoins! Join the casino!
ByBit: Leverage and spot trading, next Binance?
OkX: Again, another Binance contender?