Many crypto users are now operating across chains, regularly bridging assets from one blockchain/roll-up to another. There are now plenty of bridges available to help you do that, but finding the best road for a given token at a given time is a cumbersome exercise:
Sometime there is no liquidity on one side or another of the bridge
Sometime there is no direct bridge from one chain to another and you have to make an intermediate stop to reach your destination
Fees/slippage might vary widely from one bridge to another
In the same way that 1inch aggregate liquidity from multiple DEXs and is able to fine the optimal route for any given trade, the idea would be to aggregate multiple bridges and find the optimal route to travel an asset cross chain.
As a longer-term vision, you could imagine combining the DEXs aggregation protocol with the bridges aggregation protocol and allow user to fin the optimal route starting from asset A on chain X and finishing with asset B on chain Y.
Not sure how complex that would be to implement (I assume a lot given you have to deal with multiple chains at once), but I thought I would drop the idea here in case!
Do you really think that 1inch team haven’t thought of this in 1st place ?
There are risks involved when dealing with bridges which is why they haven’t tamed it yet
I am not assuming anything about what the 1inch have or haven’t thought of (they probably have, but I don’t see why this would be relevant). Of course there are risks involved in dealing with bridges, the same way that there are risks involved with dealing with DEXs.
This idea is not mentioned anywhere else on the forum, so I wanted to put it out there, see if other people think that would be of value.
As far as I know, there haven’t been any EIPs drafted that address this issue.
With the lack of a standardized cross-chain bridge standard, and the canonical L1<–>L2 bridges being too slow for aggregation purposes, cross-chain aggregation would require us to either use existing non-canonical bridge projects (like Hop protocol) or make our own non-canonical bridge.
Both solutions open up 1inch to a whole new set of challenges – bridges are ultimately just smart contracts, and there is always smart contract risk.
I love the idea, but we need to really weigh the pros and cons before we attempt to implement this. With the Rollup-Centric Ethereum roadmap (A rollup-centric ethereum roadmap - ethereum-roadmap - Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians) becoming a reality, I think cross-L2 aggregation would see a lot of usage. We just need to figure out if it is even possible at this point, or if we need to wait on the whole ecosystem to agree on standards first.
Disclaimer: I’m not a dev, so if I said anything that is incorrect please feel free to check me.
Thanks, appreciate you sharing. I actually found a new protocol doing just that. It’s called Rango (https://app.rango.exchange) in case you haven’t heard of it. I have been using them since yesterday and so far I am really happy, I have cross check quite a few times and they allways had the best route.
