TL;DR
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As it currently stands, transferring ETH to an L2 still requires a large initial fee — and if/when you want to transfer between L2’s, it can take up to 7 days.
Full Story
To understand how the war of the Ethereum layer-2’s will shake out, we first need to understand the relationship Ethereum currently has with its users…
If it were a conversation, it’d go something like this:
User: I have some Ethereum on a self custody wallet and was wanting to send it over to a layer-2 (L2) network to save on fees and…
Ethereum: Say no more — that’s smart of you! That’ll be $50 in transfer fees.
User: Wait, I thought those fees were being waived?
Ethereum: They are once you’ve ‘bridged’ (transferred) your ETH to an L2 — but don’t worry, if you bridge from a centralized exchange (like say Coinbase), it’s dirt cheap!!
User: Ok, cool, let’s move half my ETH to the exchange and do the ‘bridge.’
Ethereum: Nice! That will be $50.
User: God dammit – so $50 regardless, huh? I’ll just wear that fee once → get to an L2 → and be done with mainnet transaction fees.
Ethereum: Amen! Right, so do you want to bridge to Optimism? Polygon? Arbitrum? Loopring? Base? Maybe, Starknet?
User: I don’t know…I mean, I wanted to collect a Podcast NFT on pods.media?
Ethereum: Nice! They use Optimism. Bridging now.
User: Ok, cool. What if the next platform I want to explore doesn’t use Optimism? If I need transfer to a different L2 — it’ll still be cheap, right?
Ethereum: Absolutely it will! Though…it will take anywhere between 20 mins and 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 are set to pass in due time.
Learn how, in Part 3…
