Metis Bridge and the Maker Wormhole are Coming to Ethereum

Metis, a new Ethereum Layer 2 project, has announced it will launch its mainnet on November 15. Metis is supporting its launch with Genesi, a “decentralized autonomous company” (DAC) that will spend $100 million to help grow projects built on or integrated with Metis.

Metis is an optimistic rollup. The L2 blockchain is used for processing transactions, which are then bundled and posted as a single block to the L1, the Ethereum mainnet. Metis intends to position itself among popular optimistic rollups Arbitrum and Optimism, which have about $3.2 billion in total value locked.

While Ethereum L2s have become extremely popular, most require users to pay high gas fees to bridge their assets onto the L2. Many L2s also hold coins up to seven days before transferring assets back to the Ethereum mainnet.

Maker, the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) in charge of stablecoin DAI, announced their solution to these L2 problems: the Maker Wormhole. The Wormhole is a near-instant bridge with extremely low fees and short hold periods. Instead of using liquidity, the Wormhole mints and burns DAI on each side of the bridge transaction, using an oracle to track both sides.

Maker intends to integrate with Arbitrum and Optimism first, then add other L2s later. The organization plans to launch the Wormhole in Q1 2022.