Umbria Narni bridge vs. 0xPolygon bridge. First look at comparable metrics.
Umbria Network recently released a cross-chain liquidity bridge (Narni) — the first of its kind; it enables the cross-chain migration of assets between the Ethereum Mainnet and Polygon PoS chain.
The purpose of the Umbria Narni Bridge is to provide an alternative to the cumbersome validator-driven bridges — which have their place (we must give the devil his due), but are not suitable for liquidity migration where fast transaction speed and low fees are crucial.
So without further ado, here is how the Umbria Narni bridge and Polygon bridge stack up against each other:
Sending $500 of Tether ($USDT): Ethereum Mainnet — > Polygon PoS Chain.
First let’s have a look at how the Polygon bridge performed.
The transaction fee on the Polygon bridge was $16.27. The time taken for the bridge to complete the transaction was ~8 mins.
Now let’s compare how the Umbria Narni bridge performed.
The transaction fee on the Umbria bridge was $8.73. The time taken for the bridge to complete the transaction was ~4 mins.
Sending $500 of Tether ($USDT): Polygon PoS Chain → Ethereum Mainnet.
First let’s have a look at how the Polygon bridge performed.
The transaction fee on the Polygon bridge was $44.26. The time taken for the bridge to complete the transaction was ~60 mins.
Now let’s compare how the Umbria Narni bridge performed.
The transaction fee on the Umbria bridge was $32.26. The time taken for the bridge to complete the transaction was ~4 mins.
Let’s talk about how the Umbria Narni bridge outperformed the Polygon bridge.
To understand how the Umbria bridge outperformed the Polygon bridge to such a large extent, we must first understand how the bridges differ on a software architecture level.
The Polygon bridge uses a system of on-chain validation to verify transactions. The validation methods used by the Polygon bridge are driven by smart contracts, which are subject to current network congestion and fees. When the Ethereum network becomes congested, the cost to validate transactions using the Polygon bridge increases — the Polygon bridge’s transaction speed is also constrained by the speed at which the Ethereum chain can execute the underlying smart contracts.
On the other hand, the Umbria Narni bridge centralizes part of the validation process that does not need to be on-chain. Much like the centralized exchanges that cryptocurrency users are used to, the Narni bridge inherits the cryptographic assurances of the underlying asset, but validates individual transactions centrally where needed. This enables the Umbria bridge to migrate users’ assets far more cheaply and quickly than the Polygon bridge.
The Umbria Narni bridge performs liquidity migration by holding liquidity on multiple networks, simultaneously. When a user migrates liquidity from one network to another using the Umbria Narni bridge, they simply pay the transaction fee required for a regular token send, and then the transaction fee required for another normal token send on the resulting network (When transferring to Polygon, the second transaction fee is negligible). This enables the user to negate all of the expensive validation costs which would be present in an on-chain application, such as the Polygon bridge.
You can use the Umbria Narni bridge at https://bridge.umbria.network. Currently $USDT, $ETH and $UMBR are available to be bridged between the Ethereum Mainnet and Polygon PoS chain.
