Here I am once again in the SCA platform to get widely ready to partake and share knowledge with all of you by creating such amazing content for the Steemit Engagement Challenge in the first week of season five, so let me show the chosen topic of blockchain bridges as the way I'm understanding what is it about. Of course I'll be open to building feedback and suggestions of improvements.

Bridge... A physical vehicle that creates the connection between two different points and applied to the Blockchain technology, it means the communication of several types of them that are usually not able to be interrelated due to the various languages, codes and mechanisms of consensus that require a practical compatibility to exchange tokens and relevant information, where it's possible with these mechanisms, so that's why they're needed to carry out these technical activities.

Intercommunication between two blockchains that are not working with the same setting involves a pair of features translated in this way:

Who doesn't need assets to be used in another Blockchain in order to seize better services and lower fees? That's one of the main reasons for the existence of bridges because with these mechanisms you can go through different layers of a determined ecosystem like Ethereum for instance or exploring deFi spaces with your native coin like BTC converted to a wrapped token, the wBTC.

Depending of specific cases, there are certain Blockchains that serves in a higher speed than the original one in determinated moments for some transactions, so the bridges allow users to link their funds to a spot from another source in order to get excellent features to use as they need the convenient.

Of course traffic from certain points are relieved to avoid the undesirable bottleneck of information that use to take place in some Blockchains if they are having too much simultaneous transactions in their own ecosystem. So, the transportation of tokens in a very crowded Blockchain to a relatively empty one facilitates the performance once executes a travel to the new chain.

In other words, a Blockchain bridge operates on the translation from an original chain to the other one where they are initially blocked to guarantee the security of avoiding the tokens' creation from nowhere and they're pegged to the equivalent amount once the crossing is made and this status will remain by the bridge with the presence of a vault until the decision of user to undo the action in order to make back again the funds, where wrapped tokens in the other side are burnt and original funds are then unblocked.

Two main categories defines these kind of blockchain bridge mechanisms to ensure transmission of assets between them, according to the presence or not for a custodian figure to do the work, that is:

⚪ Trustless bridge: here there's a third entity that is in charge to make transfers of tokens in a centralized scenario for this case, so users have to delegate certain control of their funds to them and also get verified during the process.

⚪ Trusted bridge: actions of bridge are carried out by smart contracts that are not needing to be monitoring for someone else because they're designed to operate automatically, according to the configuration of codes to execute orders released by users, so here there's a better control over funds and an extra advantage is the not requirement of identification: there's no need for collection of data in this stage.

A classical case of a trustless bridge as example is the Rainbow or Multichain app (see corresponding image) and the trusted ones might be from Harmony, Binance, etcétera.

Due to the fact of new born of mentioned technology, it's typical for bridges to have certain flaws by the moment while developers are seeking for practical solutions that will appear with the time of using for them. The most evident ones are errors that makes room for bugs that allows vulnerability towards hacking for sure. Of course this is a bad situation due to the possibility to lose assets by using them, so it's recommended to study carefully their structure and codes of contracts before using.

In a near future, once the issue is solved, there will be a plenty of practical alternatives to move tokens from a chain to another one and enjoy the best performance in each one, with the guarantee of getting them back once user want to undo the transaction and so on. Definitely, it's a humongous world that will be developed widely with the time. Thank you for reading.