Hop Protocol, a team working on interoperability within Ethereum's layer-two ecosystem, has launched its Hop span for the first time.

A Monday blog post notes that the bridge has been launched with limited functionality, currently supporting "instant" USD Coin (USDC) transfers between the Ethereum mainnet, Polygon and xDai Chain.

Hop plans to aggrandize the number and assets it supports over "the next couple of weeks," including crypto assets Ether (ETH), Polygon (MATIC), and Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), also every bit stablecoins Dai (DAI) and Tether (USDT), and forthcoming layer-ii networks Optimism and Arbitrum.

The bridge locks up tokens that a user wishes to transfer between networks, issuing its ain "hTokens" that can be quickly and cheaply transferred between layer-twos. The hTokens are destroyed upon redemption.

Hop volition likewise launch a StableSwap automated market maker on each supported network to facilitate exchange between hTokens and their underlying assets, with Hop offer liquidity providers a 0.04% cut of all fees earned on transactions.

The StableSwap deployment on Polygon will besides offering a liquidity mining programme for USDC liquidity providers, with more than $180,000 worth of MATIC slated for distribution.

While layer-two networks have emerged as the dominant scaling solution for Ethereum, the ecosystem has lacked the infrastructure facilitating the fast motion of avails between respective layer twos.

Related: EY publishes an Ethereum scaling solution to the public domain

In March, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin revealed that sharding had been pushed behind the chain merge in the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap amid the success of layer-twos, predicting that rollups volition calibration Ethereum by a factor of 100.

However, while Buterin had then predicted rollups would be launched within a few weeks, the Ethereum ecosystem notwithstanding has not seen major rollups solutions launch to mainnet, with Optimism currently targeting July 26 for launch and Arbitrum yet to open up upwardly its guarded launch.