Bifrost Ethereum Addresses

Question

We found this quote online:

That being said, there's an important difference between bitcoin and Ethereum that you need to be aware of. AFAIK in bitcoin you can create a transactions that spends funds from multiple accounts all at once, so you could for example sweep all your accounts via a single transaction.

In Ethereum however only one account can initiate the transaction and inherently you can move the funds from only a single account at once. As such, if you split for example your mining income into 10 accounts, sweeping them together would incur 10 transaction costs.

So we already tested in. If we use myetherwallet.com we can see all the funded addresses and could manually send the eth to a single address. But this would lead to pay tx fees for each transaction and a lot of work. If an ICO has a million users then one would get a million different addresses.

How this could be resolved? Is there at least a tool which automates this?

Answer 1

Yes, this is correct. When we were designing Bifrost we had two options for Ethereum payments:

• Collect payments in a single Ethereum address.
• Generate a new address for each payment.

We decided to implement the second option because the process is easier for users. In the first option users would have to add data to the transaction and this is an additional and complicated step in a process.

The disadvantage of this method, as you already noticed, is that your ETH will be spread across many addresses. Here are my ideas on how to deal with this:

1. Do you really need to move all the ETH to a single address? They are safe spread across many addresses and you can transfer them as you need them. You will pay a fee for a transfer from each wallet but it works exactly the same for Bitcoin. You can't escape network fees.
2. You can set ethereum.minimum_value_eth config value to ensure that users don't send dust that exceed tx fee needed to withdraw ETH. You can check current Ethereum fees for an idea what should be a minimum amount.
3. You can move the cost to the users by increasing the price of your token to cover fees.
4. If you really need to move all ETH to a single address creating a tool to do it shouldn't be hard however we do not provide it with Bifrost.