Following the successful launch of cBridge 1.0 in July, Celer Network, a leading layer 2 scaling solution, is planning the launch of cBridge 2.0 that enables easy, fast, and secure off-chain transactions.
Celer Network states the cBridge 2.0 cross-chain solution will not only enable more efficient transactions but also enhance “generalized off-chain smart contracts”. The vastly improved cross-chain bridge builds on the successes of its predecessor, allowing users to enjoy a more user-friendly interface, deeper liquidity, and a wider option of blockchains and tokens.
The release of cBridge 1.0 will further bring about wide adoption rates to Celer Network with the cross-chain bridge doubling its volumes week-on-week. cBridge measured $10 million of total volume in its first month, growing to $170 million in its second month, and now records over $10 million volume on a daily basis. cBridge 2.0 is expected to follow the trajectory its predecessor took given its advancements and the overall growth of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) markets.
Simply put, cBridge 2.0 is an innovation-packed major upgrade on the cross-chain bridge market that aims to boost liquidity and provide highly efficient methods to transfer tokens/cryptocurrencies across different blockchains. According to Celer, cBridge 2.0 will offer the best-in-class cross-chain bridging experience for users, node operators, stakers, validators, and developers on the platform.
Once it launches, the upgrade will offer users deep liquidity by supporting much larger transfer sizes, simple to use interface via a single click, more tokens and chains to transfer, and native gas token wrapping such as transferring wrapped Ethereum (WETH) on Mainnet to unwrapped ETH on Arbitrum. Additionally, cBridge 2.0 also introduces the insured bridge node service level (named Slash cBridge node’s bond) to cover a transfer whenever the bridge node is unavailable.
🦄🚀🪐🧑🚀cBridge is acCELERating! 🦄🛰️🪐🛸Exceed $400M in total cross-chain transaction volume? Done. Next milestone in sight. Much💖 to our growing list of 20+ partners, 21K+ users.🔖https://t.co/35fICZsz3A: most number of chains with the lowest fee in fully non-custodial mode. pic.twitter.com/bxzNevu0Cc
— CelerNetwork (@CelerNetwork) October 9, 2021
The State Guardian Network (SGN)
Liquidity providers (LPs) and cBridge node operators will also be introduced to a highly efficient and easy-to-use liquidity management. Unlike cBridge 1.0, the new upgrade that will accrue in the near future does not require LPs to run a cBridge node in order to provide liquidity. In cBridge 2.0, the dev team added a second mode – the State Guardian Network (SGN), which itself acts as the “cBridge node”. For LPs satisfied with the overall PoS-consensus level security based on Celer token economics, they can simply delegate their liquidity to the network without running a cBridge node themselves.
“The State Guardian Network (SGN) is a specialized Proof-of-Stake (PoS) chain that serves the purposes of monitoring L1 transactions related to L2 state and faithfully passing layer-2 information back to layer-1 when needed.”
cBridge 2.0 will also minimize the risk for simple LPs to improve their experience while bridging. LPs switching to the new upgrade can’t mint synthetic assets, there will be no volatile token pair automatic market maker (AMM), little to no impermanent loss, and no complicated rebalancing of assets. This smoothens the liquidity provision aspect allowing LPs to start earning fees right away. Moreover, the upgraded cross-chain enhances the liquidity efficiency by removing double liquidity locking allowing LPs to fully utilize liquidity with the highest yield.
An AMM-style bonding curve and a flexible liquidity mining mechanism are also in place to incentivize LPs and arbitrageurs to rebalance liquidity cross-chain.
For LPs who still wish to run their own cBridge node, the SGN network becomes the “decentralized layer to allocate user transfer requests to different LPs through policies that incentivize high-quality service and competitive pricing”, the statement further stated.
Stakers and validators on cBridge 2.0 will also derive additional value following the upgrade. For their services and roles in supporting the network, the SGN will directly capture the value of cBridge via fees paid to the block producer facilitating the user’s bridging request, similar to how layer 1 PoS chains pay fees to validators.
Finally, developers can now build cross-chain messaging for NFTs, decentralized exchanges (DEXs), and other projects. This builds on the already vast decentralized applications (DApps) that developers could build on cBridge 1.0. The upgrade also comes with white-label frontend software development kits (SDK) which allows multi-chain dApps to have a built-in cross-chain experience.
The untamable rise of Layer 2 scaling solutions
There has been a wild expansion of layer 2 scalability solutions in the past few months following the launch of the Ethereum London hard fork. Arbitrum and Optimism led the charge after launching some weeks earlier than Celer which has led to the explosion of chains on layer 2 scaling solution.
The first version of cBridge welcomed a host of chains including Polygon, Ethereum, BSC, Arbitrum, and Optimism. In September, the cross-chain solution doubled its supported blockchains adding support for Fantom, xDAI, Avalanche, OKExChain, and Heco.
The functionality of the protocol has also led to a handful of integrations such as being added to the TokenPocket and ONTO cryptocurrency wallets.
