Why does the NEAR ecosystem need to migrate from using WETH to ETH?
The Near ecosystem is migrating from using WETH to ETH and this must be confusing a lot of our users, in this post we’ll explain: What’s the difference between ETH and WETH and why are we migrating from using WETH to ETH.
Ether (ETH) is the native token or currency of the Ethereum blockchain. It
is used to pay for gas, or transaction fees, when interacting or executing
contracts on Ethereum.
In the early days, many projects started launching their own tokens with
their own functions. In order to create an ecosystem of tokens where they
can interact with each other, the ERC-20 token standard was established in
2015 to set rules and regulations as the blueprint for tokens on Ethereum.
However, the ERC-20 standard was developed after the native token ETH
was released, and ETH in its original form does not conform to its own
ERC-20 standard.
In order to facilitate smart contract exchanges for other ERC-20 tokens on
decentralized exchanges, ETH has to be first converted, or wrapped into an
ERC-20 compliant version — WETH — which is a standardized format like
other ERC-20 tokens.
Wrapping ETH into WETH does not impact its value, i.e. 1 ETH = 1 WETH,
and users can easily unwrap WETH into ETH in a couple of clicks with a
DEX or DEX aggregator. This is the same as $NEAR case, since in order
to use NEAR on Ref.finance, we have to convert them to wNEAR.
But since when we bridging ETH to Near, what we actually doing is we’re
minting a NEP-141 (Near token standard) version of ETH, and we called it
nETH. And since it’s a NEP-141 token, it can interact with other NEP-141
tokens already, so suddenly, convert ETH to WETH is not necessary
anymore.
WETH make no sense on Near anymore as converting ETH to WETH
becomes a superfluous step and wastes users’ fund. And that is why we’re
migrating from using WETH to ETH, users are no longer be confused by
these 2 tokens and lose money by meaningless process.
