Transfer $1M safely—
Lock & Unlock
To support the cross-chain transfer of ETH—for example, between Ethereum and Arbitrum—ETH is wrapped to WETH and locked on Ethereum while an equivalent amount of WETH is unlocked on the layer-2 network, where it can be seamlessly unwrapped to native ETH. This received ETH can then be used to pay for network gas or deposited into DeFi applications. The process of wrapping and unwrapping WETH and ETH can be completely abstracted away as a result.
Over time, we plan to expand support for additional tokens that uniquely benefit from a lock and unlock design.
Lock & Mint
Lock and mint—Tokens are locked on the chain they were natively issued on, and fully collateralized “wrapped” tokens are minted on destination chains. These wrapped tokens can be transferred across other non-native destination chains via burn and mint or be burned to unlock tokens back on the original issuing source chain.
To accelerate the adoption of CCIP and the cross-chain economy as a whole, we’re excited to introduce a new native token transfer mechanism to CCIP referred to as lock and unlock. This upgrade means that CCIP now supports the cross-chain transfer of native ETH between different blockchain networks, starting with Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Optimism, which is made possible by WETH lock and unlock token pools.