Hop Protocol, a working group on interoperability in Ethereum’s Layer 2 ecosystem, launched the Hop Bridge for the first time.

A blog post dated July 12th indicated that the bridge, which was launched with limited functionality, currently supports “instant” USD coin transfers (USDC) between the Ethereum mainnet, Polygon and xDai Chain.

Hop plans to expand the number and assets it supports over the “next few weeks,” including the crypto assets Ether, Matic and Wrapped Bitcoin, stablecoins Dai and Tether, and the upcoming Layer 2 networks Optimism and Arbitrum.

We are proud to officially launch Hop Bridge Immediate Start $ USDC Transfer between @Ether, @ 0xPolygon and @xdaichain.

https://t.co/z8K0uAa2xg pic.twitter.com/PVtCuG5nDb

– HopProtokoll (@HopProtokoll) July 12, 2021

The bridge blocks the tokens that users want to transfer between networks and issues its own “hTokens” that can be transferred quickly and inexpensively between the two. The hTokens will be destroyed upon redemption.

Hop will also introduce an automated market maker, StableSwap, on each supported network to facilitate exchanges between hTokens and their underlying assets, with Hop providing the most advanced liquidity to providers.

The StableSwap implementation on Polygon will also enable liquidity mining for USDC liquidity providers with MATIC worth over $ 180,000 that is expected to be distributed.

While the two-tier network has emerged as the dominant scaling solution for Ethereum, the ecosystem lacks the infrastructure that allows assets to move quickly between the two respective tiers.

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In March, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced that post-chain consolidation sharding on the Eth2 roadmap had been pushed back due to the success of layer two’s and predicted that shards would expand Ethereum to 100.

While Buterin then predicted that rollups would start within a few weeks, there are still no major rollup solutions for the mainnet on the market in the Ethereum ecosystem, with Optimism currently targeting that date to start.