Sonic Gateway
Last updated
Last updated
© 2024 Sonic Labs
The Sonic Gateway is our native bridge that facilitates token transfers between Ethereum and Sonic. The bridging process consists of three steps:
Deposit Deposit your assets into the bridge, which takes ~15 minutes on Ethereum to achieve finalization and only ~1 second on Sonic.
Heartbeat After your deposit is confirmed, your assets will be bridged at the next heartbeat, which are intervals that bridge user assets in batches to ensure gas efficiency. A heartbeat occurs every ~10 minutes from Ethereum to Sonic and ~1 hour the other way. You can pay a Fast Lane fee to trigger an immediate heartbeat.
Claim Claim your bridged assets on the destination chain. That’s it! You’re now free to explore the Sonic ecosystem with your new assets.
— Introduction — Fail-Safe Mechanism — Fast Lane — Looking Into the Future — Frequently Asked Questions
In today’s evolving blockchain landscape, a native, secure bridge is critical for ecosystem health, ensuring true interoperability and preventing network isolation. Yet, many current solutions on both layer-1 and layer-2 compromise security and speed —resulting in over $2.5 billion lost to bridge hacks.
The Sonic Gateway is a revolutionary, secure bridge between Ethereum and Sonic that offers:
Security: The Gateway includes a fail-safe mechanism that safeguards user assets. If the Gateway experiences prolonged failure (14 consecutive days), users can recover their bridged funds on Ethereum.
Speed: Asset bridging is processed in intervals called "heartbeats" to ensure gas efficiency — every 10 minutes from Ethereum to Sonic and hourly in reverse.
At launch, the Sonic Gateway will only support bridging four tokens from Ethereum — USDC, EURC, WETH, and FTM. Our roadmap includes adding more tokens and introducing a permissionless mechanism for anyone to add new tokens for bridging.
While Sonic is not an L2, we are active participants on Ethereum as we spend ETH through the Sonic Gateway contracts.
The Sonic Gateway includes a fail-safe mechanism that allows users to retrieve bridged assets on the original chain if the Gateway experiences a failure. In the highly unlikely event that the Gateway or the Sonic chain is down for 14 consecutive days, users are able to reclaim their bridged assets on Ethereum.
The 14-day period is immutable and cannot be altered by Sonic Labs or any third party after deployment. Importantly, this period is not intended as a contest period but rather as an essential feature that ensures users retain custody of their bridged funds on the originating chain.
Assets bridged through the Sonic Gateway are processed in intervals called "heartbeats", ensuring gas efficiency by bundling bridging transactions together. For assets moving from Ethereum to Sonic, these heartbeats occur every 10 minutes, while Sonic to Ethereum heartbeats occur every hour.
During each interval, all queued transactions are processed simultaneously. While this system reduces costs, it may introduce waiting periods for users needing their assets bridged immediately. To address this, Fast Lane allows users to bypass the wait for a small fee and have their bridge transaction processed instantly.
Fast Lane works by adding an additional heartbeat to the Gateway. This means all other queued assets waiting to be bridged are also processed immediately, effectively accelerating the entire network. By using Fast Lane, users not only avoid delays and seize timely opportunities but also contribute to the broader ecosystem's efficiency, ensuring faster bridging for everyone involved.
By enabling canonical access to native assets from other layer-1 platforms, the Gateway fosters a secure and thriving economy on the Sonic network.
Users can directly access these canonical assets on Sonic while maintaining asset security. The Sonic Gateway thus provides safe access to high-demand assets that natively exist outside the Sonic network.
