[Guide] - How to use Binance Bridge to swap assets between chains.

Very recently I have written a couple of posts about Binance Smart Chain (BSC) related topics (links at the bottom of the post), today I'm bringing another one about a function which enables you to swap assets between chains WITHOUT leaving the security of your own wallets.

Let's talk about Binance Bridge.

Binance Bridge (formerly called Panama) it's basically a 'cross-chain' feature which allows you (sorry for the redundancy) interoperate between chains.

In other words, you can swap your native Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, ADA... etc; for their respective 'pegged' versions in the Binance Smart Chain.

And why I would be doing that? A few use-cases:

Avoid CEXE's ('Centralized Exchanges') restrictions for withdrawals (happened to me yesterday with ETH).
Avoid CEXE's withdrawal fees
Avoid CEXE's KYC (or at least partially, BSC is semi-centralized at the moment).
Control of your funds 100% of the time.

Like the Panama Canal enabled seamless trade, Binance bridge enables seamless trading across blockchains.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
The Panama Canal is an artificial 82 km (51 mi) waterway in Panama that connects the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific Ocean. The canal cuts across the Isthmus of Panama and is a conduit for maritime trade.

Let's make a test!

Spoiler, I tried it before, but for the purpose of the guide (and because I need to swap some ETH for their pegged version in BSC, I'm documenting the process step by step.

What we'll need?

You'll need an ETH wallet address, a Binance Smart Chain address and (obviously) the funds that you'll 'cross-transfer'.

If you need help to get started with Binance Smart Chain, you can setup your wallet with the help of Metamask. As I said before I wrote a guide regarding the matter. I'm dropping it here again.

(Guide) - How to Get Started with Binance Smart Chain with Metamask

The process step by step.

We start from https://www.binance.org/en/bridge#

First, we'll connect our BSC wallet to Binance Bridge.

As I said before, the best & most convenient way is through Metamask.

We should be seeing this. We'll select 'Peg-in'. Why? Because we want to 'peg' native ETH into 'pegged Ether'.

For more information about 'what exactly I'm pegging into', I'm dropping here this contract in case you want to dig a bit deeper.

https://bscscan.com/token/0x2170ed0880ac9a755fd29b2688956bd959f933f8

Long story short, you're wrapping your native ETH into a 'Wrapped ETH' version backed by the vaults of Binance.

Here you have a full list of all the binance pegged tokens.

Let's continue.

We change the 'Asset' for the desired token (in my case ETH) and the amount which I'm willing to send. You should be seeing something like this.

A confirmation tab will open. We'll recheck all our details and click 'confirm'.

Notice that you're paying a small fee which equals to (roughly) ~0,016% of my sent ETH. On top of that, I'll have to pay the typical ETH transaction fees.

A new tab opens. 'Waiting for deposit'.

We'll have to send or native ETH to this address. Also notice that we have a timer of ~2h. For that reason is best to always make the transaction from our own address and not an exchange.

We wait for some confirmations...

And voilá! In less than 5 minutes.

Now I can keep enjoying the benefits of Binance Smart Chain.

What about swapping my ETH for BNB? I can do that in PancakeSwap

Or what do you say about swapping some BTC for BTCB and be a Liquidity Provider of a BNB-BTC pool for a ~10% APY on top of fees? All of this with ~5s transactions and ~0,03$ fees/tx?

~10M liquidity of both pools. Not joking there (Wen WLEO BEP20?).

Some Sunday inner thoughts

We'll now I'm overextending a little bit. Hope you enjoyed my guide.
(I'm again compilating some useful links).

Don't miss the chance to try 'new tech' like this one to keep learning. If you're able to master it you'll be ahead of the immense majority when your neighbour asks you again (like in 2017) 'how to buy bitcoin'.

By then, you'll be a Uniswap/BSC master and you'll be dancing and ruling the world.