What is the Rainbow Bridge?
The Rainbow Bridge is a trustless, permissionless protocol for connecting blockchains. The bridge protocol removes the need to trust anyone except the security of the connected chains. Anyone can deploy a new bridge, use an existing bridge, or join the maintenance of an existing bridge without getting approval from anyone else.
The Rainbow Bridge allows any information that is cryptographically provable on Near and Aurora to be usable in Ethereum contracts and vice versa — including the ability to read the state and schedule calls with callbacks on the other chain.
The nature of the Rainbow Bridge means it is fully decentralized and adaptable to any future protocol changes. For more details about the architecture of the Rainbow Bridge, read the technical deep dive here.
How does it work?
The main use-case of the Rainbow Bridge nowadays is transferring ERC-20 tokens between Ethereum, Aurora and Near (they become corresponding NEP-141 tokens).
Transfers 'from Ethereum' usually take up to 20 minutes, and 'to Ethereum' – up to 4-8 hours. Users have an option to use the Fast Bridge to transfer to Ethereum in 5 minutes only.
Rainbow Bridge dApp allows also to:
- Browse your transfers history.
- Restore your transfers by a hash and see the detailed information, in the case you’re using another browser or device.
- Deploy the new tokens for bridging if you’re an ecosystem project or developer.
- Discover if token is already supported by it via Deploy page