Umbria, a decentralised protocol that is focused on developing DeFi apps using Layer 2 of Ethereum, has announced the development of its Narni bridge, a first of its kind cross-blockchain bridge.
With the growth of the crypto community, we have been seeing more and more blockchains being built and many tokens and projects are being launched on different blockchains. The challenge with these is the transferability and the inter-operability between the various blockchains. It is very difficult to work with different blockchains and it is also very difficult to transfer tokens and coins across the blockchains.
Though there are many bridges in operation and many under development as well, the coverage is still pretty much in its infancy and the ease of use is also a big question. Umbria seeks to fill that gap by building the Narni bridge that would initially enable the transfer of UMBR tokens to the Ethereum and MATIC (Polygon) mainnet. The company also plans to expand this bridge in the later phases to cover the Binance Smart Chain and any Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible chain.
As an example, it can be seen that if anyone wants to move assets from the Polygon (MATIC) network to Ethereum, it takes a lot of time and the transaction costs are also very high. Also, new entrants into the crypto world face a technical challenge as well as the process involves several complex steps. Umbria hopes to overcome all these issues with its Narni bridge by enabling this transfer with just a few clicks so that the wallet can work with multiple chains. It would also suggest the correct configuration of the Metamask wallets so that the assets across different chains can be tracked, the company said.
“The release of Narni will be a watershed moment in providing our community with an improved user experience across our DeFi products and services. Narni will be a hub for transferring between chains and solve the current issue of lack of blockchain interoperability and scalability,” commented Barney Chambers, co-lead and co-founder of Umbria Network. “We are moving towards being blockchain agnostic; ultimately Umbria’s bridge will realise full frictionless interoperability between a universe of chains.”
The company also expects that the majority of the bridged assets to be stablecoins which means that the liquidity providers are likely to earn much more APY than those who do normal DeFi farming.
Another point to note here is the continued growth of the MATIC(polygon) network with more and more developers building on it and for it as well. It is likely to emerge as a strong challenger to the Ethereum network if the ETH network does not pull up its socks and cuts down its gas fees and brings in scalability quickly.