Celer: Token bridging across different blockchains
The Multi-Chain Future Needs Interoperability
The blockchain space is heading towards a multi-chain future that is full of new and exciting opportunities. While different blockchains host a variety of unique qualities and a multitude of projects, the tech barriers between them have been a long-standing reason that the average user only has access to limited protocols on different chains.
For people who want to maximize their opportunities and leverage the benefits of different DeFi, GameFi, NFT, and SocialFi protocols, it is essential to have free-flowing assets and messages between the blockchains.
That’s where interoperability projects like Celer cBridge come in.
What is Celer cBridge?
Celer cBridge is an answer to the influx of blockchains being built over the last few years.
Pioneering in the interoperability space, Celer cBridge is a decentralized non-custodial asset bridge that supports secure, fast, and low-cost transfers for over 130 tokens across more than 30 blockchains and layer-2 rollups. Being EVM-compatible itself, cBridge can support any EVM-compatible chains easily, and has extended to non-EVMs like the Flow blockchain.
Compared to other bridging solutions, Celer cBridge has achieved very competitive cross-chain transfer pricing with its unique and highly-optimized tech stack. Cross-chain transfers usually cost a user between 0% to 0.04% of the total amount transferred.
Celer cBridge has incredibly fast finality without trading off on the security of cross-chain transfers. Transfers only take a few minutes before the fund arrives at users’ destination-chain address, while all transfers are secured by the State Guardian Network, a decentralized Proof-of-Stake blockchain.
Collectively, validators verify each transaction, and reach a consensus before green-lighting the cross-chain transfer. In the unlikely event of a validator misbehaving, their stakes will be slashed and taken away from them, which economically promotes the security, availability, and honest participation of validators on the network.
The transfer fees paid to cBridge stay in the ecosystem, and are given directly to the liquidity providers and State Guardian Network validators and stakers, incentivizing people to provide sufficiently deep liquidity for cross-chain transfer use, and helps with security across the network by rewarding staking in validators.
What makes cBridge unique?
Celer cBridge is unique in the bridging space in many ways. It features a simple one-click user experience, over 30 blockchains, more than 130 tokens and verifiable security with the State Guardian Network that ensures no funds are ever lost.
The pillar of cBridge’s state-of-the-art features is the State Guardian Network (SGN), Celer’s own Tendermint-based Proof-of-Stake blockchain that serves as the message router connecting to different blockchains. Validator nodes are run on the SGN, and are required to stake CELR tokens in order to participate in the consensus process. If a validator node acts maliciously towards the network, their staked tokens can be “slashed”, effectively making their node invalid. The added security from “slashing” economically promotes the security, availability, and honest participation of validators on the network.
SGN stakers and validators get block rewards as well as earnings captured from Celer cBridge transactions, which incentivizes more stakers and validators to join the network, thus strengthening the overall security.
How does cBridge work?
While the user experience is the same one-click “transfer-and-receive” for cross-chain transfers when using cBridge, the underlying workings of the technology actually support two different bridging models, xAsset and xLiquidity. The xAsset model is a canonical mapping model that employs a lock-and-mint or mint-and-burn process, while xLiquidity is a pool-based model which relies on liquidity provision.
For xAsset, when a user transfers funds from the source chain to the destination chain, their funds are first locked in a source chain cBridge vault. The State Guardian Network then detects the transaction and passes the information to cBridge’s destination chain contract, which then mints the fund and sends it to the user.
While for the xLiquidity, users are depositing their funds in the source-chain liquidity pool, while receiving funds from the destination-chain liquidity pool provided by LPs, with the SGN serving as the underlying message router. The model has the benefits of no medium token and high liquidity efficiency.
For liquidity providers, cBridge economics highlight extremely enticing LP rewards. LPs can provide liquidity in a single-token pool to join liquidity mining, and as liquidity is moved across different chains by cross-chain transfer requests, LPs gain additional earnings from the liquidity utilized. Withdrawing liquidity is as simple as depositing. With one click, LP’s liquidity can be aggregated from different chains and removed to a designated chain.
The Celer cBridge LP experience is simple and straight-forward. Unlike other bridging solutions where LPs do not know where their liquidity is due to nontransparent liquidity reallocation, cBridge offers complete transparency so that every LP’s liquidity is explicitly tracked and displayed for them. Adding liquidity is just one transaction that is recorded in the SGN’s chain state. The SGN not only tracks liquidity better, but also uses it more efficiently as it uses the entire pool’s liquidity to calculate the cost and slippage. Liquidity providers have a much easier time distributing their liquidity to different chains and have to go through significantly fewer steps in reallocation and removal as well.
The efficiency of the liquidity provided is much higher with cBridge resulting in the verifiably lowest bridging fees of any existing protocol. cBridge does this by employing a weighted bonding curve. For more details of the bonding curve employed, see our documentation on Bridge Rate.
Try cBridge yourself and take advantage of the opportunities on different chains as we progress into this multi-chain future together!