With more and more NFTs, and NFT games and artists and projects using Polygon to airdrop or release or mint NFT collections and NFT games, avoiding the gas fees on ETH mainnet. If you’re into NFTs, you’ll inevitably get to the point where you’ll need to add the Polygon custom RPC mainnet, wrap ETH to Polygon and actually switch to the Polygon Mainnet for real, where you will need MATIC to do much cheaper transactions on the various NFT Marketplaces or swap, farming, pool and liquidity sites.
Get on over to https://wallet.polygon.technology/ and check out the useful suite of tools used for bridging and swapping and documentation. A good site for adding new networks to your Metamask or web3 wallet, is https://chainlist.org/ where you’ll find a long list of available EVM protocols with the chain ID, and RPC urls, coin symbol, and so on. In Metamask you can click settings>networks> and see the details for each network you currently have for each account.
Main things to note is the ability also to bridge ERC-20 tokens. So when you connect your Metamask to the bridge, you can transfer or bridge ETH or ERC-20 tokens or other tokens that show up being available in your wallet. Click through a couple of continue buttons on the popup, then you’ll need to pay the two transaction gas fees to transfer. Depending on the current gas fees, you might need to time this to be least expensive. There will be two transactions, so it can easily end up being costly! Hopefully it’s worth it in the end when you get the transfer done, you’ll be able to start using Polygon Mainnet to do your defi, saving on those gas fees.
I found it’s easy get confused and waste money on transactions, when trying to bridge to different chains, or get stuck halfway through or feel like assets just disappear or get lost when transacting or trying to use liquidity or farm pools on Sushi Swap and so on…. Or you don’t send enough and get stuck mid-way, also when you’re on OpenSea, you can wrap eth to buy Polygon NFTs, but that is still on the Eth mainnet, same thing if you send MATIC to your Metamask, I found that it remained as wrapped on ETH and had to pay to bridge the MATIC to Polygon mainnet.
For more information and examples, my recommendation is to search Youtube for some of the most recent tutorial videos out there, search for terms like:
- How to Bridge Ethereum to Polygon
- How to Bridge to Polygon
- Bridge Eth to Polygon Mainnet
- Polygon Bridge
- Adding a new RPC network
Redundant of making a video on it myself, I thought well, let’s not reinvent the wheel, so here are a couple of videos I already watched and found useful, one is bridging eth and tokens to Polygon, the other is bridge from Polygon to Fantom.
Enjoy the short article and we’ll keep adding to this as we find more useful resources and videos we can link to. So far we’ve added new information about adding new RPC networks to Metamask and added trending posts in the footer.
Next in the pipeline will be a similar overview of bridging to Avalanche, which I did recently in an experimental venture into the dapp world, I bridged some AVAX and scored the air drop, which was enough to mint a couple of experimental meme / NFTs, I made a few steps towards setting up a server droplet on Digital Ocean and got as far as nginx running and created some SSL keys, but tbh, still very new to Ubuntu and SSH, so more on that another time…