The Rainbow Bridge is Live on NEAR Protocol: Welcome To A New Era of Interoperability
The NEAR Team is excited and proud to announce that the NEAR — ETH rainbow bridge is fully functional and live between both the NEAR and Ethereum main networks! In context, the Rainbow Bridge has been under development for more than six months, led by Bridge team lead Dr. Alex Shevchenko. As one of the first fully permissionless, decentralized and openly accessible bridges in the crypto-sphere, the NEAR — ETH Rainbow bridge allows for the seamless integration of assets and contracts between the NEAR and Ethereum blockchains.
While the successful completion of the bridge stands as a significant milestone in the development of the NEAR Ecosystem, the deployment of the bridge as a solution for moving assets across blockchains signifies a new era of interoperability, value creation, and cross-chain collaboration.
Here is why the Rainbow Bridge Matters:
The Rainbow Bridge Brings Liquidity to NEAR Protocol
NEAR community members, prospective entrepreneurs, developers, and existing projects are going to be massively affected by the launch of the Rainbow Bridge: For the first time, a host of new assets, contracts, and solutions can move from Ethereum over to NEAR, to provide liquidity and asset integration with native NEAR solutions.
“The Bridge enables the transfer of any token, NFT, or asset between the NEAR and Ethereum blockchains. The capacity to write ethereum contracts using the state of a contract or validator on NEAR. The capacity to call contracts back and forth on the bridge.”
Dr. Alex Shevchenko explains this value proposition specifically in reference to the future of DeFi on NEAR:
“The bridge brings access to liquidity that is available on Ethereum. That is the most important thing. Many of our partners are saying, we would like to launch Automatic Market Making — We would like to launch flash loans, or another DeFi project, so they would like to do it. But in order to do this, they need to have a backbone of DeFi — multiple ERC20 tokens that are interchangeable that they can trade etc. That is the most important thing that the bridge is enabling.”
The NEAR Ecosystem is now ready to start integrating ERC20 assets with native NEAR Solutions. Prepare for an influx of new and existing applications onto the highly scalable and usable NEAR Protocol!
The Rainbow Bridge Allows Ethereum Applications to Scale
From the Ethereum side of the bridge, the Rainbow bridge is a gamechanger for fixing one of the largest bottlenecks that currently exist for Ethereum applications: High gas fees, and the inability to scale. With the Rainbow Bridge, NEAR effectively becomes a collaborative Layer 2 solution for existing applications and assets deployed on Ethereum. With the impending launch of the EVM on NEAR, Ethereum developers can bridge their assets across to NEAR, run their solution for a fraction of the cost, and still keep all of their contracts and infrastructure on Ethereum!
Dr. Alex Shevchenko explained this value proposition in the following manner:
“In order to scale you need to cut your costs for the gas fees. In order to cut your gas fees you need to go to another layer 2 solution, or some other layer 1 solution that will provide lower cost. Here, the bridge helps you to transition the state of your contracts or the liquidity you are capturing into another blockchain. Another thing that helps you to do this transition is support from EVM on the NEAR side. This is something we are going to roll out soon. In general, this is another thing that helps people to transition.”
The Rainbow Bridge Is a New Standard of Permissionless and Open Innovation in Crypto
While developers and entrepreneurs may jump on the possibility of using the bridge to access new assets and liquidity for their project, there is a larger — more theoretical — value proposition of the bridge that will only grow in importance as time goes on: The Rainbow Bridge is fully permissionless and decentralized. Unlike most bridges today in the crypto-sphere (that are centrally handled via a proof of authority consensus) the NEAR — ETH Rainbow bridge is not controlled by any single entity. As the Bridge team explains:
“You only need to trust what it connects, the NEAR and Ethereum blockchains, and you don’t need to trust the bridge itself. There is no authority outside Ethereum miners and NEAR validators.”
As a future guarantee towards the integration of the NEAR and ETH blockchain, there is no single actor capable of halting or removing assets that flow between the two ecosystems. The bridge is open — for anyone and everyone — at any time and for any ERC20 or NEP-21 asset!
What Can We Expect In The Future from the NEAR — ETH Rainbow Bridge?
The bridge is in many ways only the very beginning of the rise and development of the NEAR Ecosystem. In combination with the EVM currently preparing for launch on NEAR, the bridge will provide a seamless and permissionless flow of assets between protocols: Expect new DeFi solutions on NEAR, a host of ERC20 assets moving between chains, and a storm of new projects and developers eager to scale their existing Ethereum applications!
