Snowbridge on Kusama

Ecosystem
1

Snowbridge is a common-good, community owned trustless Ethereum to Substrate bridge. The bridge does not rely on multisigs or any other third party, but rather leverages the economic security of both Ethereum and Polkadot by using on-chain light clients on both chains to validate transactions.

Polkadot Mainnet

The bridge has been live on Polkadot and Ethereum mainnet since June 2024, operating smoothly since its launch. We are working with key parachains and wallets to seamlessly integrate Snowbridge. The major Polkadot wallets (SubWallet, NovaWallet, Talisman) all support viewing assets bridged with Snowbridge. Integrations with Bifrost, Moonbeam, Mythical Games and Hydration are ongoing and at various stages of completion.

To transfer ERC-20 tokens to Polkadot, visit https://app.snowbridge.network.

Ongoing Development to Support Kusama

At launch, Snowbridge enabled ERC-20 token transfers from Ethereum to Polkadot. In January 2025, we will introduce Polkadot-native token transfers to Ethereum, further expanding cross-chain functionality. Our team is currently working on an improved version of the bridge that will lower fees, improve UX and support new features such as Transact support (arbitrary contract execution both on Ethereum and Polkadot) and bridging to Kusama.

Snowbridge will connect Ethereum and Kusama through bridge composition, combining the existing Snowbridge (Ethereum ↔ Polkadot) with the Polkadot-Kusama bridge. This setup will be seamless to users, who will experience it as a direct Ethereum-to-Kusama bridge.

Further technical information about the implementation is available: https://hackmd.io/@vgeddes/SJezt4J0C

Launch on Kusama

The launch on Kusama is scheduled for the first half of 2025, in line with Snowbridge’s 2022 proposal to support ERC-20 token transfers to Kusama. Supporting Kusama depends on key infrastructure components like XCM v5, anticipated for release in 2025. Our team is actively developing on these components, with the improved Snowbridge version scheduled to launch alongside XCM v5.

We are excited to extend Snowbridge to Kusama, supporting ERC-20 tokens and liquidity from Ethereum. As we make progress, we will keep the community updated on key milestones leading up to the 2025 launch.

We want to hear from you!

Let us know your thoughts about using Snowbridge on Kusama, or any other feedback that you might have.

13 Likes
2

hey @claravanstaden, that’s amazing news!

btw, will it be possible to bridge between a Kusama parachain and a Polkadot parachain. eg. Moonriver <> Moonbeam? that’s something we really need

also, I’m unable to access the hackmd link. I’m getting the following error

image
image1118×727 17.8 KB

1 Like
3

Keep it up! Glad to hear our birdie friend is not neglected.:bird:
Besides XCMv5 are there any other hard requirements for Kusama launch?

Our use case is DAOs in Kusama that have presence in other chains and ecosystems. So besides individual users doing token transfers we are looking forward to have ways to translate the origin of a Kusama DAO into the equivalent of a sovereign account that can execute actions on the other side of the bridge. I’m not Ethereum versed to know how this might work but as an example imagine there’s a birdie shop on Ethereum selling birdie nft food and the birdieDAO in Kusama wants to buy some of that nft food, they’ll use their open governance to vote on sending an XCM necessary to buy that food, the sender will be an XCM location like GlobalConsensus(Kusama)/Parachain(2281)/Plurality("bird"|Voice).

3 Likes
4

Thanks for the update @claravanstaden . 100% support this - definitely interested in in integrating Moonriver as soon as possible!

5 Likes
6

Awesome! Great to hear that @aaron2048. We will message you in our Telegram group once we are ready to integrate.

1 Like
7

turrizt The Kusama page is now public (it required login on Hackmd before).

It will be possible to bridge between parachains, yes. It might not be in a single Xcm transaction at first
and would require a multi-hop.

8

olanod thanks for you comment! :slight_smile: There aren’t any other dependencies on the polkadot-sdk, besides XCM v5. It does depend on some rearchitecture on Snowbridge. Development is nearly completed and slated to be included in the polkadot-sdk stable-2503.

The scenario you have described sounds feasible. We’ll need to work out the details of the origin (GlobalConsensus(Kusama)/Parachain(2281)/Plurality("bird"|Voice)) but in principle it would work.