ad-astra.elrond.com | The Grand Ethereum - Elrond Bridge Step-by-Step Tutorial
There are many blockchains out there today, which come with their native coin, like what EGLD is for Elrond, BTC for Bitcoin, ETH for Ethereum, etc.
However, it would be fantastic if tokens were not tied to the chain on which they were generated and could travel between networks, allowing token holders and projects to explore alternative DeFi options on other blockchains.
This is called interoperability, and this is why Bridges exist.
A bridge between two blockchains allows you to do just that, transfer or bridge over a token from one blockchain to another.
Using a Bridge is way simpler than you think.
First of all, we will access ad-astra.elrond.com.
We will leave the "From" and "To" fields as they are since we do want to transfer from Ethereum to Elrond.
Here, initially, we can select from a list of Elrond-approved tokens to transfer between the two networks.
In the beginning, only tokens that are whitelisted by Elrond can be bridged over from Ethereum.
This list will get updated and more tokens will be added down the line.
In our case, we will choose USDC, and we will send over 2500 USDC.
Now we will need to connect to our Metamask wallet.
We will click on "Connect Source Wallet", select the account that holds the tokens we wish to transfer, and we will approve the connection in our Metamask Extension.
In step 2, we will connect to our Elrond wallet, the one where we wish to deposit our tokens.
If you don't have an Elrond wallet, you can visit get.maiar.com and create one.
As you can see, there are a few Elrond wallet options to choose from.
In this tutorial, I will choose to connect with the Maiar DeFi wallet, which is a browser extension just like Metamask, created by the Elrond team.
Step 3 is where we will check one more time the details of our transfer, and if everything looks good, we will go ahead and confirm the transfer.
You can choose to start over if something doesn't look right.
Click on "Confirm Swap".
We will be asked to confirm a few transactions in your Metamask wallet.
The fee here is from the Ethereum blockchain itself for the transactions, and sadly Elrond has no control over that.
You will confirm the first transaction and wait for the Ethereum network to process it.
Now, there's only one more transaction to approve in Metamask.
We will need to wait for a minimum of 10 minutes for the transaction to be secured on Ethereum before it can finally be processed on Elrond.
We don't have to do anything more but wait for this process to finish.
And it's done.
We can click on the transaction hash to check out the transfer details on the Elrond Blockchain Explorer.
We can check our wallet to make sure we received the tokens.