We’re excited to share that Fern is now officially multi-chain, with our recent addition of support for Polygon. As part of our Polygon rollout, we’ve also introduced a number of UX improvements that make it easy to reliably interact with your multi-chain Fern wallets.
Your wallets
All Fern crypto wallets have been upgraded to automatically support Polygon.
We guarantee that all Fern wallets maintain the same address across supported chains, so your Fern multisigs will have the same address across Ethereum mainnet and Polygon. This enables you to receive payments on both networks knowing that your assets will end up in the right place.
We have updated the wallet linking experience so you can now save wallet addresses by network.
Contact wallets
You can now add contact payment wallets by specifying currency and network. This enables you to be very clear that a contact’s payment account can accept a specific currency and exists on the stated network. If your contact has a wallet that can support multiple networks and currencies, you can add these as additional payment accounts for that contact.
Chain-agnostic USDC and supported currencies
Fern currently supports USDC and ETH. As a result, there are now three different asset flavors available on Fern — USDC on Polygon, USDC on Ethereum mainnet, and ETH on Ethereum mainnet.
You can always see chain-specific currency balances from your accounts views. However, in various parts of the product, Fern shows you your USDC balance as one chain-agnostic USDC balance. We want to reduce cognitive overhead for you as much as possible when you’re thinking about transferring crypto. We accomplish this with automated bridging (see next section).
Automated bridging
When making a crypto transfer, if your funds are on a different network than the destination network, Fern will let you know how much needs to be bridged and the exact route your funds will take to their destination. You confirm the transaction, and Fern will do the bridging behind the scenes for you.
Say you have 10,000.00 USDC on Ethereum mainnet and 1,000.00 USDC on Polygon. You want to transfer 1,500.00 USDC to a contact's wallet on Polygon. Fern will display the route your funds will take, including bridging 500.00 USDC from Ethereum mainnet to Polygon automatically and then transferring the total amount to your destination address.
Note: Fern currently covers the cost of gas for all transactions (except offramps), including the cost of automatic bridging.
The Payment and Transfer experiences are updated with automated bridging features.
Offramps
Offramps have been updated to automatically bridge to Polygon before initiating the offramp process. If your funds are already on Polygon, no bridging will be needed. These updates should result in reduced gas fees for offramp transactions across the board.
Payment requests
When you create a new payment request, you now have the ability to select which networks you’re willing to accept payment on.
If you select more than one network as an accepted payment method, those fulfilling your payment requests will get to choose which network they want to use for the transaction.
Feedback?
We’d love to hear what you think about these changes, or if you have any other requests or feedback for Fern. Send us a note at hello@fernhq.com.
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