Full-stack web3 developer, learn more about my projects here: https://github.com/tempe-techie 

8/ But wait, why does a canonical bridge swap the native coin (DEGEN) into ETH? Why doesn’t it just bridge DEGEN directly without doing a swap in between? 🤔

Well, now we’re getting into the second part of the problem:

It looks like the Degen Chain Bridge does NOT actually use the canonical bridge. This is why DEGEN gets swapped into ETH during the bridging process instead of being sent to Base directly.

And it also explains why the bridging process happens within a few minutes instead of 7 days (which is a normal time period for canonical bridges of optimistic chains).

Users on Degen lost funds because the default bridge is not the canonical bridge.

This is why we need fast canonical bridges!

ZK solves this (faster settlement). Shared sequencing can also solve this (atomic mint/burn).

Security doesn't matter until it does.