Experimenting with bridges, portals and squids...

First posted on https://www.publish0x.com/?a=46dBr8Dod7


Good morning/evening.
 
You may be aware from previous posts that I have an aversion to bridges, you could even call it a fear. It is made worse by reading about many bridge hacks/exploits. It is not the actual using the bridge that I have a problem with.
 
This brings me to how I wasted a morning! Although I guess I learnt something so perhaps not as wasted as I thought. 
 
THE PROBLEM
 
I have some spare funds on Solana and I want them on Cosmos and as we know, 

Cosmos is an ever-expanding ecosystem of interoperable and sovereign blockchain apps and services, built for a decentralized future.

In my words it went something like 'Cosmos, the chain linked to loads of other chains'!
 
SOLUTION 1
 
Send the SOL to Kucoin (or other CEX) switch it to ATOM and then send it to Cosmos to then switch it to TIA or whatever I may want on Cosmos. The switching on Cosmos does not bother me, it's a few cents....
 
SOLUTION 2
 
Switch the SOL into USDC on Jupiter and then use Portal bridge (wormhole) I checked that Solana - Cosmos was ok popped in the wallet addresses and hit the button...Send. I thought I was clever, but I did only send a small amount as a test, but it will be a regular thing in the future. 
Picture from Portal bridge website.
 
From there it all went t**s up, the money had come out, but had not reached the Cosmos wallet, I checked to see if I had to import the token, checked the transaction on chain and it was nor showing up. All the while David is tut tutting at me lol. So then I had to join their Discord, no I'm not a bot, no I won't be rude then scroll through and see some people with the same issue but no resolution so I had to open a ticket and thought oh well it's not much just suck it up! But someone answered me straight away.
 
 He was really helpful and gave me the steps to follow to basically claim the transaction and revert the transaction back to my Phantom wallet. The reason it failed was no liquidity.
 

You bridged a token, which has no liquidity on the target chain. You will need to use Portal bridge to bridge this one back. You can do this by pasting the token contract address (which you can find in your wallet or with your address in the blockchains explorer) into the Portal “select a token” search field.

I did all that and all was good, the USDC came back with minimal if any fees. This is the link to the token's and their available liquidity.
https://app.osmosis.zone/pools
FAQ link here for portal bridge
https://portalbridge.com/docs/faqs/liquid-markets/
 
SOLUTION 3
 
 
So this brings me back to my original problem, I did not retry the Portal bridge but may do in the future, instead I went like this:
Convert IOT to USDC (Jupiter)
Use https://allbridge.io/ convert SOL/USDC to POLYGON/USDC (I have bits of MATIC for gas on loads of wallets)
Send that to Metamask.
Then I went to https://app.squidrouter.com/
And switched straight into the Keplr wallet.
 
Although that sounds a bit of a task, it was actually quite simple, costing only $0.66 in total for all transactions. It also means I can easily convert my Helium IOT tokens into TIA to add to my already staked TIA.
 
Although it took quite some time to figure out the right way to go about this, now I have done it and have learnt another lesson on my crypto journey. If you know of a better way of doing this then please let me know!
 
As always thank you for reading and please feel free to comment.