Enhancing blockchain interoperability and improving UX: Umbria’s Narni Bridge
Cross-chain interoperability is a hot topic in today’s multi-chain space. However, cryptocurrency mass adoption will only happen when people can move their assets to different networks quickly, easily and cheaply.
Fast, cost-effective transactions, a great user interface and an all round superior user experience is what Umbria’s Narni bridge is offering right now.
What is a blockchain bridge?
Developers are moving away from the Ethereum Network for their dApps. This is due to issues of scalability and network congestion, which are regularly exacerbated during macro events such as geopolitical tensions, bull runs, new innovations in the space, Bitcoin rallies (Elon Musk posting a new meme 😜). Devs are embracing alternative chains and Layer 2s — networks built on top of other blockchains — as transactions are far more efficient in terms of cost and speed.
A blockchain bridge connects these different and otherwise incompatible networks allowing assets such as tokens and coins to be transferred between different chains/networks for example Ethereum and Polygon or Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain. Although the protocols, rules and governance structures on chains may differ, a bridge allows them to safely interoperate.
Sounds good; so where does Umbria come into this?
The user experience when bridging assets has often been problematic with high barriers to entry. Traditional validator-driven, mint/burn, lock/unlock bridges are very expensive and slow for transferring funds between chains, which negates the advantages of being on Ethereum alternatives.
The Narni bridge vastly improves the UX: it’s easy-to-use and facilitates the cheapest and fastest asset transfer between Ethereum Mainnet and a host of EVM-compatible chains.
Anyone can freely move their assets cheaply, quickly and easily and have access to one-to-one human support via our Discord. This has led to Narni’s adoption by many NFT, GameFi and DeFi platforms and a multitude of partnerships in the space as we help projects onboard more users.
How does the Narni bridge work? What’s special about it?
By using a novel liquidity-provision protocol, Narni enables users to transfer crypto funds between chains at fractional cost compared with traditional validator-driven bridges.
To facilitate the cross-chain migration of users’ assets between networks, Umbria employs numerous liquidity pools on different blockchains. When a user wants to bridge they send their assets to the oracle on one liquidity pool and then the oracle sends the assets back on the different blockchain. This enables many cross-chain transactions, which would otherwise be rendered impossible by constraints imposed by network validators. The Narni bridge negates these cumbersome elements, which results in significantly cheaper, faster transactions whilst maintaining the cryptographic assurances of an oracle.
https://bridge.umbria.network/staking-pool/
How do the liquidity providers benefit?
Anyone providing liquidity to the pools earns fees when anyone bridges assets — of the same type provided - from one blockchain to another. So, if someone were to provide ETH to the liquidity pool they would receive ETH when anyone uses their liquidity to bridge ETH from one blockchain to another.
It is even more compelling for those that are liquidity providers of our $UMBR governance token. They earn even more and get 60% of all fees generated by the bridge in all the assets we support — ETH, MATIC, GHST, USDC, WBTC, USDT.
The Narni Bridge Widget
Then we have our bridge widget V2. This enables platforms and projects to provide the cheapest, fastest bridging directly to their communities. This widget can be integrated very easily into a project’s platform/website as a simple iframe meaning anyone can bring the functionality and seamless bridging experience of Narni to their userbase.
Ultimately we’re providing on a large scale the accessibility that’s required for mainstream adoption of crypto.
Find out more about the widget and our referral program here.
What’s Umbria’s prime objective going forward?
Our prime objective is to be the fastest and cheapest bridge that connects to the most blockchains — we want to be truly blockchain agnostic and the main hub for cross-chain transactions. Improving the user experience is key for the crypto industry to grow and see mainstream adoption. This is what we’re driving.
To recap
- Umbria’s bridge is realising full frictionless interoperability between a universe of chains
- Umbria is simplifying the over-complicated user experience to make the world of crypto, NFTs, GameFi and DeFi more accessible
- The benefits for the user are easy, super-fast and cheap cross-chain transactions
- Platforms/projects such as Layer 2 DEXes, DeFi aggregators and NFT MMORPGs can onboard more people easily
- In DeFi, cheap and fast bridging means participants can take advantage of arbitrage opportunities and quickly and easily chase yield on platforms such AAVE and Compound.
