Continuing to improve the experience for all decentralized app users on Avalanche.

Avalanche is showing no signs of slowing down. Next month, the Avalanche-Ethereum Bridge will roll out on mainnet, a tremendous effort across multiple organizations including ChainSafe, Protofire, Hashquark, POA Network, and Avascan. The Bridge will enable a seamless, two-way flow of assets between the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystems across Avalanche and Ethereum.

While the Bridge gets ready for showtime, newly created functionalities will optimize the experience for DeFi users and developers on Avalanche.

• To ensure that users can seamlessly move between Avalanche and Ethereum, Wrapped AVAX (WAVAX) is now live on Avalanche and Ethereum. WAVAX will increase exposure to AVAX across Ethereum and enable liquidity to more readily interoperate across our ecosystems.
• Asset transfers are enabled between the Exchange Chain (X-Chain) and Contract Chain (C-Chain) on Avalanche directly through the Avalanche Wallet so users can easily leverage the high transaction throughput of the X-Chain while benefiting from the growing decentralized application ecosystem on the C-Chain.
• As a final bonus, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) capabilities are being expanded on Avalanche with the NFT Studio within the Avalanche Wallet. Anyone with a free Avalanche Wallet can now launch their own series of NFTs with just a few clicks for the easiest NFT experience in crypto.

Wrapping AVAX to Enable Simplified Decentralized Apps

Avalanche’s C-Chain runs the Ethereum Virtual Machine. As such, all protocol-level rules and structures on Ethereum are also present on the C-Chain. The ERC-20 standard is a commonly used standard within Ethereum to issue fungible or interchangeable assets. For decentralized applications to seamlessly transfer one token for another, they need to use the same standard.

AVAX, the native token for Avalanche, is not an ERC-20 standard. Although technically feasible to trade AVAX and ERC-20 tokens, it becomes a bit complicated for developers and traders to enable this transfer. Wrapped AVAX (WAVAX) will simplify the experience for AVAX-denominated use cases.

Bridging the Avalanche X-Chain and C-Chain

The Avalanche X-Chain is the fastest chain within the Avalanche platform primarily used for creating and trading digital assets.

To date, developers were the only individuals able to transfer assets between the X-Chain and C-Chain enabling liquidity for Avalanche minted assets to flow into apps built on the C-Chain and vice-versa. Now, the X to C-Chain transfers are enabled for anyone using the Avalanche Wallet, so traders and DeFi users can seamlessly deploy their AVAX and Avalanche-native tokens on Ethereum apps built on the C-Chain.

X-Chain to C-Chain swaps were also recently added to AvalancheJS, enabling our developer ecosystem to add this powerful functionality to 3rd party wallets and Avalanche integrations.

Transaction fees on the Avalanche C-Chain are denominated in gas and must be paid in the native token, AVAX. As of recently, Ethereum gas costs have begun to spike up again due to the increased usage of prominent apps like Uniswap. With the X-Chain and C-Chain now connected, not only will you save gas costs with Ethereum apps built on Avalanche, but you’ll be able to benefit from the interoperability between Ethereum and Avalanche asset standards.

On Avalanche, gas fees on the C-Chain are currently set at a fixed price of 470 gwei. As a trader, you will enjoy consistent fees that won’t increase to a level that makes it prohibitive to move your funds in and out.

*Note: X-Chain to C-Chain transfers is only available for the Avalanche Wallet. Other wallets will be supported soon.

Use NFT Studio to Mint NFTs

From the upcoming Polyient DEX launch on Avalanche to Ava Labs’ Blockchain Gaming Alliance membership, it’s still in the early innings of NFTs on Avalanche. To date, developers were the only ones with the ability to easily mint NFTs on Avalanche.

NFT Studio makes it easy for anyone to easily mint a single or entire set of NFTs directly within their Avalanche Wallets. Not only is this the easiest NFT creation experience in crypto, but NFTs on Avalanche benefit from fast transaction throughput, near-instant transaction finality, and transaction fees that are a fraction of a cent.

We’re excited about these latest updates to the Avalanche platform and look forward to expanding the features available to developers and users with the impending release of Avalanche’s first major upgrade, Apricot.

These enhancements are just the latest of many steps we are taking to improve the Avalanche experience and opportunities for technical and non-technical individuals alike. As always, we encourage you to share your feedback on these updates, as well as recommend others you may have in mind. Join us on the Avalanche Forum or Avalanche Discord.

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About Avalanche

Avalanche is an open-source platform for launching decentralized finance applications and enterprise blockchain deployments in one interoperable, highly scalable ecosystem. Developers who build on Avalanche can easily create powerful, reliable, and secure applications and custom blockchain networks with complex rulesets or build on existing private or public subnets.

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Road to the Avalanche-Ethereum Bridge was originally published in Ava Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.