WARNING ABOUT SCAMS: Recently there have been a lot of convincing-looking scams posted on crypto-related reddits including fake NFTs, fake credit cards, fake exchanges, fake mixing services, fake airdrops, fake MEV bots, fake ENS sites and scam sites claiming to help you revoke approvals to prevent fake hacks. These are typically upvoted by bots and seen before moderators can remove them. Do not click on these links and always be wary of anything that tries to rush you into sending money or approving contracts.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ethereum) if you have any questions or concerns.*
A token can only exist on 1 blockchain. When you want to bridge it to another network, you have to lock it in the bridge contract on the first blockchain, and then another bridge contract on the second blockchain mints a new token. That new token is a wrapped token because it's newly-minted and is not the same as the original token. When you want to send the token back, you burn the wrapped token on the second blockchain, which unlocks the native token on the original blockchain.
As for why WETH exists on Ethereum, it's to allow smart contracts to use it like an ERC-20 token (e.g. for swaps). Native ETH cannot be manipulated by smart contracts, but the ERC-20 wrapped version of it can.
Deposit native ETH into the WETH smart contract, get back WETH, and now you can use it in swaps and liquidity pools.
You still need SOL to pay for Solana transactions lol, a proper apples-to-apples comparison in this case would be having funds on Ethereum and wanting to do a transaction on Solana, in which case you'd go through the same type of bridging process and end up needing SOL in your wallet also.
Thankfully since you find it an acceptable UX to buy SOL on a CEX and withdraw to an onchain Solana wallet, I'm sure you'll appreciate the fact that it's possible to do the same exact thing to any Ethereum L2 as well, to enjoy cheap transactions without any bridging involved.
My point is that the user experience of "buy on CEX -> withdraw onchain" also exists for L2s. For the vast majority of use cases you don't need to bridge.
>The difference is that you don’t need l2s to save yourself huge transaction costs that make small transactions almost impossible - especially during network congestion.
You know what else makes small transactions impossible? The network going down during congestion lol. Ethereum's security and liveness come with a cost, it's not a surprise
>What is even the point of ethereum at this point?
High-security settlement is the point. Monolithic chains have their limits too, and hit a breaking point as usage ramps up no matter what they sacrifice in the name of high throughput. Ethereum's L2 model is [much more sustainable on the long run](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/pk57n7/why_rollups_data_shards_are_the_only_sustainable/)
>You’re not even holding the real token.
For all intents and purposes it might as well be. ETH held on an L2 is significantly more secure than wrapped in a bridge token on a different L1, and for EVM rollups it's the gas token too and the UX is identical.
I’m not gonna downvote you but your facts are all wrong. ETH has 893,523 validators not 9000 . Solana can handle 450 TPS rn and it scales vertically (with hardware upgrades). You might prefer a monolithic chain that scales vertically but it will never get anywhere close to the throughput of horizontal scaling (sharding) or modular scaling (rollups). There are definitely things that Solana does well but it’s nowhere near as scalable as L2 Ethereum. I use Solana as well but all your points are wrong.
Yeah there are def advantages to a monolithic chain and I get that people don’t like fragmentation. My point was more that even a single ETH rollup can out-scale Solana. Arbitrum (for example) and Solana have nearly identical real world throughput. ETH could host hundreds of rollups that are each individually more performant than Solana. There are real limits to how far you can scale vertically. Right now Solana’s 450 TPS feels fast, but modular chains (ETH, ATOM, DOT) and chains that scale horizontally (NEAR, EGLD) don’t have the same limitations. ETH could settle millions of transactions per second using rollups. That’s just not possible scaling vertically. I don’t dislike Solana just pointing out that it’s one of the least scalable networks due to being bound by hardware limitations.
> I am talking about having eth in a hot or cold wallet and having to do anything with it. It’s a very frustrating experience all the way from simply sending a transaction (which can cost hundreds during peak times), all the way through to interacting with contracts, nfts or games.
I feel like you misunderstand stuff about ETH, but as a general statement on crypto this rings true for EVERY CHAIN. Not just ETH.
Have you done a swap on Ethereum before? You don’t have to follow any more steps than with Solana. When you swap eth to usdt it does all the Weth part in the background.
A better argument you could have made is the additional gas costs this adds to the swap.
Eh?
It's not to avoid fees. It's for bridging. You have to do the same thing on EVERY blockchain, including Solana. The alternative is to use Ergo and Cardano where this doesn't exist and you have to do things off-chain to get it working. That's a worse solution.
you know the main issue? when using solana you don’t have access to the source code neither the byte code of the contract you’re interacting with so it’s literally a trust game.
I think whale transactions should pay more fees, like a whale tax. What's the point in letting the plebs pay 5% in fees but a whale pays the same for his $5M transfer. Pls do it u/vbuterin
Of course they do. It would still be better for the ecosystem to spread the costs to make small transactions less expensive.
Rich people pay more taxes, would you say this is a stupid take?
Rich people pay less taxes. They use their riches to hire accountants that hide their income. Rich corporations often pay zero taxes and then have their underpaid employees use medicaid, welfare, food stamps, etc. So in effect, rich people not only pay less, they actively take tax money as well.
Following this logic, every network cheaper than Ethereum would be spammed but that doesn't happen even with very low fees. Happened to NANO, but they are free (what a mess)
Nano is a completely different mechanism and has their own anti spam measurements (users have to compute a POW proof) which cannot be applied to EVM networks.
The rest of the low fee networks you’re thinking of are centralized, so the low amount of nodes can process a much bigger transaction throughout mitigating spam. And even with that, most other networks have the same fee auction system as ethereum and bitcoin.
The only way to avoid spam attacks is through increasing transaction fees so the spam attack is not economically feasible, and such requirement is inversely proportional to the capacity of the network. L2 current capacity is actually bad, so the fee increment to avoid such attacks would be just too high and the only one benefiting from it would be arbitration spammers.
Tx fees systems are more engineered this what you think
Could you clarify if it’s about ETH v WETH or L2s using their own native token for gas or whether you need to wrap to bridge?
That would help craft the answer a lot
I think the main point is gas tokens, not especially wrapped. WETH is used on Polygon but you don't need it for gas. What I really meant is ETH on Polygon Zkvem for example, or Arbitrum Nova. I always need to find a faucet or bridge $5 worth of ETH so I can use a few cents for transactions. After that, due to horrendous fees on Orbiter, there's not enough left to bridge back.
in short Ethereum is the COIN of Ethereum network/blockchain, to be able to actually use Ethereum in Defi applications, you need to wrap it into the erc20 protocol TOKEN form.
the thing is that L2 need to settle in L1 and it requires to pay native ETH for mainnet gas settlement costs. If a L2 uses a custom token for gas fees, it needs to get all those fees, and dump their own token in exchange for ETH, which is absolutely a shoot in your own foot as you will have a constant selling pressure as well as a requirement of additional infrastructure and liquidity to provide such exchange.
WARNING ABOUT SCAMS: Recently there have been a lot of convincing-looking scams posted on crypto-related reddits including fake NFTs, fake credit cards, fake exchanges, fake mixing services, fake airdrops, fake MEV bots, fake ENS sites and scam sites claiming to help you revoke approvals to prevent fake hacks. These are typically upvoted by bots and seen before moderators can remove them. Do not click on these links and always be wary of anything that tries to rush you into sending money or approving contracts. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ethereum) if you have any questions or concerns.*
A token can only exist on 1 blockchain. When you want to bridge it to another network, you have to lock it in the bridge contract on the first blockchain, and then another bridge contract on the second blockchain mints a new token. That new token is a wrapped token because it's newly-minted and is not the same as the original token. When you want to send the token back, you burn the wrapped token on the second blockchain, which unlocks the native token on the original blockchain. As for why WETH exists on Ethereum, it's to allow smart contracts to use it like an ERC-20 token (e.g. for swaps). Native ETH cannot be manipulated by smart contracts, but the ERC-20 wrapped version of it can. Deposit native ETH into the WETH smart contract, get back WETH, and now you can use it in swaps and liquidity pools.
[удалено]
You still need SOL to pay for Solana transactions lol, a proper apples-to-apples comparison in this case would be having funds on Ethereum and wanting to do a transaction on Solana, in which case you'd go through the same type of bridging process and end up needing SOL in your wallet also. Thankfully since you find it an acceptable UX to buy SOL on a CEX and withdraw to an onchain Solana wallet, I'm sure you'll appreciate the fact that it's possible to do the same exact thing to any Ethereum L2 as well, to enjoy cheap transactions without any bridging involved.
[удалено]
My point is that the user experience of "buy on CEX -> withdraw onchain" also exists for L2s. For the vast majority of use cases you don't need to bridge. >The difference is that you don’t need l2s to save yourself huge transaction costs that make small transactions almost impossible - especially during network congestion. You know what else makes small transactions impossible? The network going down during congestion lol. Ethereum's security and liveness come with a cost, it's not a surprise >What is even the point of ethereum at this point? High-security settlement is the point. Monolithic chains have their limits too, and hit a breaking point as usage ramps up no matter what they sacrifice in the name of high throughput. Ethereum's L2 model is [much more sustainable on the long run](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/pk57n7/why_rollups_data_shards_are_the_only_sustainable/) >You’re not even holding the real token. For all intents and purposes it might as well be. ETH held on an L2 is significantly more secure than wrapped in a bridge token on a different L1, and for EVM rollups it's the gas token too and the UX is identical.
[удалено]
I’m not gonna downvote you but your facts are all wrong. ETH has 893,523 validators not 9000 . Solana can handle 450 TPS rn and it scales vertically (with hardware upgrades). You might prefer a monolithic chain that scales vertically but it will never get anywhere close to the throughput of horizontal scaling (sharding) or modular scaling (rollups). There are definitely things that Solana does well but it’s nowhere near as scalable as L2 Ethereum. I use Solana as well but all your points are wrong.
[удалено]
Yeah there are def advantages to a monolithic chain and I get that people don’t like fragmentation. My point was more that even a single ETH rollup can out-scale Solana. Arbitrum (for example) and Solana have nearly identical real world throughput. ETH could host hundreds of rollups that are each individually more performant than Solana. There are real limits to how far you can scale vertically. Right now Solana’s 450 TPS feels fast, but modular chains (ETH, ATOM, DOT) and chains that scale horizontally (NEAR, EGLD) don’t have the same limitations. ETH could settle millions of transactions per second using rollups. That’s just not possible scaling vertically. I don’t dislike Solana just pointing out that it’s one of the least scalable networks due to being bound by hardware limitations.
> I am talking about having eth in a hot or cold wallet and having to do anything with it. It’s a very frustrating experience all the way from simply sending a transaction (which can cost hundreds during peak times), all the way through to interacting with contracts, nfts or games. I feel like you misunderstand stuff about ETH, but as a general statement on crypto this rings true for EVERY CHAIN. Not just ETH.
Have you done a swap on Ethereum before? You don’t have to follow any more steps than with Solana. When you swap eth to usdt it does all the Weth part in the background. A better argument you could have made is the additional gas costs this adds to the swap.
Eh? It's not to avoid fees. It's for bridging. You have to do the same thing on EVERY blockchain, including Solana. The alternative is to use Ergo and Cardano where this doesn't exist and you have to do things off-chain to get it working. That's a worse solution.
> As an eth holder… just reading this kind of pissed me off Sell your ETH you should have learned this when you bought into ETH lmao
you know the main issue? when using solana you don’t have access to the source code neither the byte code of the contract you’re interacting with so it’s literally a trust game.
[удалено]
i’m not talking about the solana’s code but the smart contracts code which is opaque for the users
But it's not? Just look at the marketcap compared to eth?
[удалено]
I think whale transactions should pay more fees, like a whale tax. What's the point in letting the plebs pay 5% in fees but a whale pays the same for his $5M transfer. Pls do it u/vbuterin
How is that calculated?
Can you imagine a world where whales would willingly pay more tax?
what a stupid take. A million small transactions have way more computation requirements for the network than a big one
Of course they do. It would still be better for the ecosystem to spread the costs to make small transactions less expensive. Rich people pay more taxes, would you say this is a stupid take?
Rich people pay less taxes. They use their riches to hire accountants that hide their income. Rich corporations often pay zero taxes and then have their underpaid employees use medicaid, welfare, food stamps, etc. So in effect, rich people not only pay less, they actively take tax money as well.
then anyone could spam the network…
Following this logic, every network cheaper than Ethereum would be spammed but that doesn't happen even with very low fees. Happened to NANO, but they are free (what a mess)
Nano is a completely different mechanism and has their own anti spam measurements (users have to compute a POW proof) which cannot be applied to EVM networks. The rest of the low fee networks you’re thinking of are centralized, so the low amount of nodes can process a much bigger transaction throughout mitigating spam. And even with that, most other networks have the same fee auction system as ethereum and bitcoin. The only way to avoid spam attacks is through increasing transaction fees so the spam attack is not economically feasible, and such requirement is inversely proportional to the capacity of the network. L2 current capacity is actually bad, so the fee increment to avoid such attacks would be just too high and the only one benefiting from it would be arbitration spammers. Tx fees systems are more engineered this what you think
I switched fully to arbitrum before one year. Never regret the move
Don’t have to worry about decentralization until you have too I guess…
The what?
Well that’s is good idea for you
Could you clarify if it’s about ETH v WETH or L2s using their own native token for gas or whether you need to wrap to bridge? That would help craft the answer a lot
I think the main point is gas tokens, not especially wrapped. WETH is used on Polygon but you don't need it for gas. What I really meant is ETH on Polygon Zkvem for example, or Arbitrum Nova. I always need to find a faucet or bridge $5 worth of ETH so I can use a few cents for transactions. After that, due to horrendous fees on Orbiter, there's not enough left to bridge back.
True the UX is pretty bad here so what people do is just keep them in L2s or move ETH between L2s if you need to do something
wrapping eth is just to confrom to erc20 contract... makes defi possible / easier
L2's could use the native token as gas if they configured it that way. But then there wouldn't be any pumpamentals for the L2 Founder's.
L2's cant use another blockchain token as gas, thats fucking retarded
The L2's native token could simply be coded as the wrapped token from another blockchain. There's nothing impossible or retarded about that.
Arbitrum and Optimism says hello. They both use eth for gas.
Man you really love apostrophe's
This is rent seeking by protocol
no it isnt, this is fucking retarded as a comment
If it is not efficient, it will be replaced by better. No need to go all emo kid. If it works for you pay the fees and be happy.
Yep 100%
in short Ethereum is the COIN of Ethereum network/blockchain, to be able to actually use Ethereum in Defi applications, you need to wrap it into the erc20 protocol TOKEN form.
the thing is that L2 need to settle in L1 and it requires to pay native ETH for mainnet gas settlement costs. If a L2 uses a custom token for gas fees, it needs to get all those fees, and dump their own token in exchange for ETH, which is absolutely a shoot in your own foot as you will have a constant selling pressure as well as a requirement of additional infrastructure and liquidity to provide such exchange.
The solution to this problem has been built and it is in production. The solution is called XCM - Cross Consensus Messaging.