A new crypto bridge will make Tether transactions cheaper

Tether's CTO hopes that a new EOS-Bitcoin interoperability bridge will one day make the tether cheaper and faster as users will be able to make transactions on less congested blockchains.

A bridge between EOS and Bitcoin

Paolo Ardoino, who is also CTO of the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange, a subsidiary of Tether, said that this is one of the reasons why he worked with the team in the token wrapper project, pTokens, to develop an interoperability bridge between Bitcoin networks and EOS.

With the launch on Friday, the company will initially support a wrapper for listing the bitcoin on EOS mainnet – pBTC. Basically, a user will be able to deposit funds in a network, for example Bitcoin, and pToken will issue the user with the equivalent amount of "wrapped" tokens on the new network.

The company hopes to support a bridge between litecoin and EOS, as well as between EOS and ethereum. An EOS wrapper for an ERC20 tether token is currently in the planning phase, according to the pTokens website. Founder Thomas Bertani said there were still no plans to consider developing an EOS tethering wrapper on Omni, a secondary layer on top of the Bitcoin protocol.

The advantage of interoperability

A key advantage of interoperability is that users can better exploit the different characteristics of the different blockchains, said Ardoino. One of the initial reasons why Tether created an ERC20 version in 2017 was to avoid the congested Bitcoin network.

“Omni cost a lot of money, up to $ 500, Ethereum wasn't so saturated, so commissions were cheap. Any operator would have preferred to move the funds to the Ethereum blockchain because it was cheaper and faster, "said Ardoino. However, Ethereum's speed has slowed down due to network congestion as early as the end of 2017.

Creating an interoperability bridge between Ethereum and EOS – which has higher throughput and much less chain activity – essentially provides users with a "backup" option, so that they can continue to negotiate with minimal fees and fast settlement times, he said.

Ease of use

Many cryptocurrency exchanges, including Bitfinex, already offer users two different types of tether, so the ability to exchange protocols already exists in some form. However, interoperability bridges make it easier for users themselves to move between different protocols.

Major exchanges seeking to exchange a $ 10 million fund between two chains will always be able to organize it directly independently, he said. But, he added, greater interoperability will allow retail investors with fewer tether quantities to move freely between different blockchains.

Ardoino hopes that his involvement with pTokens will encourage other developers to build bridges to other protocols, creating greater connections between all the different chains. The improvement of interoperability could one day act as a bridge for the launch of the tether on many other new protocols, he concluded.