How does this Bridge make a profit exactly?
How does this Bridge make a profit exactly?
I waited until the ETH fees were low enough and last weekend we got some 3 Gwei fees and I figured it would be the perfect time to bridge from Arbitrium to Ethereum.
Found a bridge called Synapse. I put in my details about which chain to use and to what destination chain. It was only $2.5 cost. I was like wow, amazing. I assumed it would be $2.5 plus some other gas fees.
So I nervously made the transfer and to my surprise the quotes were correct. Only $2.50 went towards fees, plus a 1 penny transaction gas fee on Arbitrum.
Then out of curosity I checked the ETH transaction and it turns out the Bridge had to pay almost $4 in gas just to make the bridge. So its a loss to them. Why would they do this? I verified the sent token and its not a fake scam token, everything seems legit. So why is the bridge operating at a loss?
They are making profits on other services they offer, and think not all bridging is the same as yours, there are some times and some chains that you actually pay more than the actual costs of the transfers from the chain.
As I checked, Synapse Protocol has these Swap, Pools, and Stake features where they can make profits there, there will be some fees there that they can use to cover what OP encountered.
Yup, I can agree with your calculations, There’s no doubt that from the common / Bussnies perspective, this looks like a bad deal that they are subsidizing their users and making a bad business move in loss/no profit.
But From where I’m thinking of it, buddy this is their business strategy to help their users reach goals and activity goals, as you can see this protocol provides, Staking, DEX intrachain, and other network bridging services as well, Once you find any product/service cheap you always prefer to go for it next time as well, so you are now familiar with them, you’ll probably going to use other services provided by them as well due to your previous experiences. This is how they earn profit from diversified ecosystems dn utilize their some of profits to attract more users.