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#BridgeAcrossWithACX

What I'm going to say may sound like heresy. The reality is that I hate MetaMask. Deeper down, what I really dislike is DeFi, and more deeply (those who follow me will have seen me write this several times), I really dislike PoS and its dangerous centralization of decentralization. In short, I still think that PoS is a trivialization of Satoshi Nakamoto's proposal, and a hostile takeover of the concept of decentralization to bring cryptocurrencies to the Wall Street casino.

Knowing how the international banking-financial-stock market circuit works, it is clear to me that the money that a few earn is the money that many lose, and that is against my moral system. DeFi is a financial roulette in which some make others believe that a token will rise a lot in price, and those who enter lose everything they put in, because the professional vampires always win. They are the master market makers and bubble-makers who trap the unwary. Satoshi Nakamoto had a vision of a world without intermediaries, without banks, without stockbrokers, without cavemen. But for the moment, the intermediaries have taken control of operations, with their ETFs and other tricks, leaving the market in the hands of the powerful. Luckily, thanks to Nakamoto's cunning and mathematical wisdom, no one can issue BTC if they are not miners, and that is still what gives value to the PoW coin, which today as I write reached the 100k milestone.

That is, DeFi is the traditional international banking financial system, but disguised as asymmetric cryptography, inducing a supposed decentralization with blockchain technology, but totally dependent on a few PoS validator whales against which retail investors can do nothing. They only earn a few hundred or thousand dollars if they are lucky enough to enter at the right time and in the right protocol. In other words, it is the casino. If you go to the casino and play “color,” there is a 50% chance that you will get black or red. Nothing to do with decentralization. But obviously, every person has the right to go to the casino, feed little pigs and little fish so that they are stronger and can kill others, play at being the king of a remote country, and other sources of monetary inspiration.

In fact, MetaMask is in the hands of a company, that is, the “decentralized solution” depends on a CEO who is ordered to maximize shareholder profits. None of this has to do with the PoW vision of thousands of interconnected computers mining cryptocurrencies according to an unalterable algorithm. The only way to produce new BTC is through mining. In contrast, with DeFi, new cryptocurrencies are produced through games, loans, supposedly decentralized exchanges, airdrops, staking, faucets, and other similar proposals that invite participants to get rich more or less immediately. These new monetary emissions are the result of providing liquidity to very sophisticated platforms, in which the casino owner always wins.

There are about 16,000 coins listed on CoinGecko that operate on more than a thousand exchanges. The vast majority of coins are built on Ethereum or some of its L2s. There are very interesting projects that can last over time and offer a great business tool to their holders and operators. But they will always depend on the validation of whales that manage the PoS protocol. There is no total decentralization in PoS.

As long as intermediaries exist, the PoS protocol will exist. For the moment, ETH and its children are still necessary to operate in certain circumstances and environments. In my case, as little as possible.

MetaMask is the most conspicuous and almost perfect lair for PoS projects. I only have “dust” in MetaMask. I am diverting to MetaMask the ETH that I receive as tips to my posts on Publish0x. But lo and behold, Publish0x has decided to build itself on Optimism. So I receive these ETH on the Optimism network. You will see that this is very important in the story that follows.

It turns out that, not so long ago, one of the currencies in which tips could be received on Publish0x was $SPOT. One of the many projects that could not be. I was able to exchange several SPOTs, but I was left with some, about 20 SPOTs, something like $28. A short time ago I decided to recover those 20 SPOTs. My life will not change if I recover them, but my self-esteem can receive a great boost if I succeed and my “self” can project itself into the unknown space, the final frontier.

Publish0x honors us once again by inviting us to talk about a project related to Ethereum, the Across ACX protocol, presented as a cross-chain token bridge that transfers value between mainnet Ethereum and L2s, simplifying the user experience by ensuring that tokens can be transferred quickly and with minimal fees. When I read this, I decided to give it a try to recover my $SPOTs for now trapped in MetaMask, like the wood of the taiga in the boreal ice.

Unfortunately, MetaMask puts all kinds of obstacles in my way when I want to swap my SPOTs for ETH, as can be seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1 – Swapping on MetaMask

I don’t plan on depositing a single cent of cash to get my $SPOTs back. As you can see, my friend the fox tells me that, to complete this swap, I must add 0.01898 ETH. Since I am receiving ETH tips on the Optimism network, I then decide to transfer the ETH I have on Optimism to the main ETH network, in order to gather the necessary ETH to be able to make the swap. So I go to MetaMask, and then to the “bridge” section, and what do you think happens? See figure 2.

Figure 2 – Bridging on MetaMask

No bridge options available.

Before I continue, I must say that as the years go by and one gets older and wiser, one also experiences a very noticeable loss of patience. The talk of decentralization enabled by PoS protocols is all well and good, but I am not going to beat around the bush. If they don’t solve the problem for me right away, I move on and that’s it. Life goes on. Also, I hate being given orders. And when developers don’t find an intuitive and seamless solution, then they start giving orders. The order I get is to try to bridge at least $30, or to change networks and/or tokens. Great help! My Italian grandfather would have replied Va fanculo!

In short, I cannot do what I want with MetaMask. You will tell me that I am operating with very small numbers. But size, as you know, is absolutely relative. New York is very far away if you are in Buenos Aires, but if you are in Boston, it is not that far. Using the same criteria, I can say that the numbers I want to move are not low and, on the contrary, that the fees charged by that network are very high.

In short, we know that to make a good profit in DeFi, one has to be a whale, or accept that in the casino the casino always wins

But then Publish0x introduces me to Across Protocol, they invite me to participate in a contest, and they tell me that you can bridge anything between ETH and its L2s and with very low fees. And that the first thing I should do is try to “straddl”. So I go to straddl. Bad idea, as you can see in figure 3.

Figure 3 – Straddl experience

From the home screen, I click on Connect Wallet, and choose MetaMask, because that is where I have the ETH in the Optimism network that I want to bridge to the Ethereum network, to collect the fee necessary to recover my $SPOTs.

There you can see that they give me the order “Please approve the connection in your wallet and authorize access to continue”. What would you expect next? I tell you what I would expect: a prompt that says something like “approve”, on that screen or on the MetaMask screen. Well, none of that happened. The space-time continuum entered an event horizon, until I decided to send everything to hell, because not only did straddl not let me continue, but it also caused me some existential doubts that I still don’t dare to take to my therapist. For example, “Do I have a MetaMask account or not?” or, “Is there a hidden language, something like the ancient language of the Phoenicians or Atlanteans that is telling me “approve” and I can’t figure it out?” Is Brave isolating me from the world? Has the time for web3 not come for me yet? Who am I? Where am I going? What gives meaning to my life? Well, time will tell.

So, having lost the battle with straddl, I still had a chance on the Across Protocol site.

There I went to Across.to

First of all, I must say that the aesthetics of the site are very pleasant and relaxing. Kudos to the design team.

However, what I discovered there is the subject of more questions and re-questions, as you can see in figure 4.

Figure 4 – Across site experience

After the “bridge now” invitation, I try to connect my wallet. I search for MetaMask, and boom! Rejected! Then I click “learn more.” An article pops up saying that these things happen and that we are facing a common problem due to intensive use of web3, and that I should take care of the browser configuration, that the wallet extension is enabled, or that I have too many wallets installed, or that I should take care of understanding the challenges that the Brave browser poses to web3 wallets, even when it is updated.

In short, “it can fail.”

Don’t count on me for such tasks.

My “intent” was good, but I get the impression that the relayers never knew about its existence.

All in all, this Across Protocol thing didn’t do me much good. They could at least specify on the homepage that it doesn’t work with small amounts of crypto, or that it shouldn’t be used with Brave, or that I should make sure I don’t have too many wallets installed. But there is no such specification at the beginning.

Anyway, from what I see some colleagues writing, a lot of people are using the Across protocol very successfully for quite some time, which brings me back to my existential problems.

However, after studying the Across Protocol Docs, I must admit that the concept of an architecture based on intents and relayers competing for work is really very creative and interesting. It is quite close to PoW architecture. Relayers are something like DeFi miners in a PoS environment, with the karma that, in the end, the party will have to be validated at some stage of the process by a PoS whale.

The Across protocol is a product of Risk Labs, a centralized company that defines itself as a practitioner-based solutions consulting company, managed by a team that has held senior Treasury, Risk & Finace roles in a number of regional and global banks. That is, traditional finance and banking everywhere, now playing decentralization. Honestly, I have a lot of mistrust.

I insist that I have a lot of mistrust, as a concept, of supposedly decentralized solutions, managed by a centralized company, with a CEO who reports to shareholders who demand balance sheets with profits.

Conclusion

It's all a matter of perspective.

When something is presented as something very good and positive, the question is: good for what?

About 40 years ago, when I was studying engineering (I'm an electronic engineer), there was no so-called "financial engineering" as a career. Humanity would not know this monstrosity until the mid-80s, when the wild experiment of capitalism without reins or leashes was launched, kill or be killed, run for your life, this is the wild west. A group of young people who called themselves "yuppies" saw the enormous opportunity to make fortunes without working, simply by dismantling companies and selling them in parts, restructuring their debts, doing "financial engineering." Wikipedia defines financial engineering as "the use of financial instruments to restructure an existing financial profile and thus obtain another with more desirable properties." Bullshit. In reality, financial engineering consists of detecting companies with major financial problems, almost dead, on the verge of bankruptcy, buying their debts for peanuts, destroying them and selling their parts. Not just companies, but also countries. While finance is necessary in any economic system, when an economic system has only financial components, collapse is imminent, because the fuel for finance is provided by the real and tangible economy of the production of goods and services.

I relate DeFi to the financial engineering of the 80s. I believe that a historical opportunity has been given to a series of individuals to make fortunes at the expense of the unwary, inventing a series of protocols that end up in the well-known scheme of the always winning casino. This, mounted on the disruptive technology of blockchain. The PoS protocols that are mounted on ETH are very clever and are very well disguised with games, airdrops, memecoins and proposals for immediate enrichment. But I do not believe that they contribute much to the development of a solid, sustainable and decentralized economic system. Across Protocol presents itself as a great tool to streamline DeFi, and proposes, noblesse oblige, a very creative and attractive architecture. But, good for what?

PS: Just a few words about Discord, because there is a part of the prize that is related to posting something on Discord. I think it is easier to understand how the microcellular process of reproduction of the liver cells of the Seychelles blue crab is, than to understand how Discord works and try to get hooked on its intricacies. I tried many times, but evidently, Discord does not vibrate according to my genetic code. So I have nothing to share on Discord.

Thank you for visiting!