TL; DR
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As it stands now, transferring ETH to an L2 still requires a high initial fee – and if/when you want to transfer between L2s, this can take up to 7 days.
Full story
To understand how the war of the Ethereum layer 2s will play out, we must first understand the relationship Ethereum currently has with its users…
If it were a conversation, it would go something like this:
User: I have some Ethereum in a self-custody wallet and wanted to send it to a layer 2 (L2) network to save on fees and…
Ethereum: Say no more: that’s smart of you! That’s $50 in transfer fees.
User: Wait, I thought those fees were waived?
Ethereum: They are once you ‘bridge’ (transfer) your ETH to an L2 – but don’t worry, if you bridge from a centralized exchange (like Coinbase for example) it’s dirt cheap!!
User: Okay, cool, let’s move half of my ETH to the exchange and do the ‘bridge’.
Ethereum: Nice! That will be $50.
User: Goddammit, so $50 anyway, huh? I only bear that fee once → move to an L2 → and be done with the mainnet transaction fees.
Ethereum: Amen! Right, so you want to build a bridge to optimism? Polygon? Arbitration? Running ring? Base? Maybe, Starknet?
User: I don’t know… I mean, I wanted to collect a Podcast NFT pods.media?
Ethereum: Nice! They use optimism. Bridging now.
User: Okay, cool. What if the next platform I want to explore doesn’t use optimism? If I need to switch to another L2 — It’ll still be cheap, right?
Ethereum: Absolutely, it will be! Although… it takes anywhere from 20 minutes to 7 days for the transfer to complete.
User: My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
Good news is: these are just the growing pains of the world’s second largest cryptocurrency!
They will pass in due time.
Learn how, in part 3…
