Building Bridges the Easy Way

Announcing Easy Bridge

Easy Bridge is a simple way to move assets between blockchains. Beginning as a collaboration between Axelar and Strangelove, our goal was to build a user-friendly bridge leveraging Axelar’s technology. From the start our designs focused on average crypto users. We wanted something anyone can use to leverage the power of Axelar’s bridge technology. Now, users can move tokens on a MetaMask wallet, like USDC, over to IBC-enabled Cosmos chains like Osmosis with ease. Lightweight in implementation, Easy Bridge is the newest and most powerful way to move assets from one chain to another.

Easy Bridge Target User

We intended to target the general crypto user for this project. We suspect it is someone looking to leverage interchain applications coming from a MetaMask experience and looking to expand their holdings to other protocols. When building the low fidelity designs it was important to look at competitor brands to see trends within the industry. For instance, gathering information from Discord channels to understand the user’s pain points. From Discord channels we found that there were common themes including wanting accessible customer support and seeing the progress of their transaction. With that insight it was important to include features like step-by-step directions to provide the extra support that users wanted. We also presented a progress bar of users transactions to make sure the user knew what was going on at all times.

How Easy Bridge was Built

There are two ways to transfer assets cross-chain with Axelar:

• Call sendToken on an Axelar gateway EVM contract.

• Get a deposit address using the AxelarJS SDK.

With those methods all we need to do is connect our frontend with the wallets (MetaMask & Keplr) and execute the transaction.

On the Ethereum side, we connect our frontend to MetaMask using wagmi, which offers a good developer experience and robustness. On Cosmos we connect to Keplr.  We need to use the Keplr API directly since there were no libraries that wrap Keplr at the time. This can be a pain point for some frontend devs that want to create decentralized applications (dApps) in the Cosmos ecosystem. To fill our internal needs Strangelove decided to create a library called Graz (React hooks for Cosmos). Graz wraps the Keplr API, offers robustness, a good developer experience, and matches wagmi patterns. Graz is a collection of React hooks containing everything you need to start working with the Cosmos ecosystem. By using Graz, frontend devs can focus on their product and leave interfacing with Keplr to Graz. Easy Bridge is the first adopter of Graz, and interfacing with Keplr has never been so simple.

Roadmap

Strangelove is interested in adding swaps to Easy Bridge, making for a seamless bridge that can also swap tokens in the middle of transfer. This will make Easy Bridge the premier decentralized bridging technology in the interchain.  Strangelove plans to support Easy Bridge in collaboration with Axelar by continuously iterating on the product.

Contributors

• Kiki Fikri - Lead Dev

• Jehnesa Herdsman - UX

• Diana Wattanapongsakorn - Visual Design