A New Layer 2 Bridge Between Polygon and Arbitrum Is Launching

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Ethereum interoperability project Wanchain will launch a cross-chain bridge between Polygon and Arbitrum.

Wanchain Will Deploy an Ethereum Layer 2 Bridge

Wanchain has entered a strategic partnership with Polygon to create a decentralized bridge between the sidechain and Arbitrum, a popular Layer 2 rollup solution on Ethereum.

In a Tuesday press release shared with Crypto Briefing, the Wanchain team said their planned bridge will allow transfers directly between Polygon and Arbitrum without the need to use the Ethereum mainnet.

Commenting on the planned Polygon-Arbitrum bridge, Li Ni, VP of business development and operations at Wanchain, said:

“Wanchain’s new Layer 2 bridges preserve the high transaction throughput and low costs of Polygon while remaining efficient, versatile and decentralized.”

Wanchain will join other existing multichain bridges on Polygon, including Hop Protocol, AnySwap, Wormhole, Connext, and Celer.

The Wanchain bridge will use liquidity pools to move tokens between two networks. Hop Protocol was the first to deploy a bridge that leveraged liquidity pools for bridging assets between Ethereum, Polygon, and Layer 2 solutions.

Sandeep Nailwal, the co-founder at Polygon, said the cross-chain bridge will “facilitate better liquidity and utility for the Polygon ecosystem.” The Polygon teams boast one of the top scaling projects on Etherereum, consisting of its flagship Proof-of-Stake sidechain and other rollup solutions like Hermez and Miden.

Building a Polygon-Arbitrum will likely help the Wanchain team acquire new users and potentially drive some value for its interoperable tech stack.

In the last year, Polygon has rapidly expanded to a level where it currently supports some of the biggest decentralized applications (dApps) on Ethereum including OpenSea, Aave, SushiSwap, Curve, Balancer, and others. Similarly, Arbitrum is currently the most widely adopted Layer 2 solution on Ethereum that supports about $2.4 billion in total value locked across various dApps.

Wanchain was one of the first interoperability projects to hit the crypto scene. After its initial coin offering in 2017, the project made efforts to position itself as an ETH killer but struggled to find meaningful adoption. Wanchain’s existing cross-chain infrastructure supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS, Binance Smart Chain, Litecoin, and XRP Ledger.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH, MATIC, and other cryptocurrencies.

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