A client paid me in ETH on Optimism, but I need part of it on Ethereum mainnet for a payment I have coming up. At first I thought I could just send it to the same wallet address and switch networks afterward, but obviously that doesn’t move the funds from one chain to the other. Now I’m trying to do this without watching a big chunk disappear in fees. Where do people usually move ETH from Optimism to mainnet, and what’s the normal way to do it?

Since both networks use ETH, it’s easy to assume a regular transfer should be enough until you actually try to move the funds across. One route is through an exchange that accepts ETH deposits on Optimism and lets you withdraw ETH on Ethereum mainnet. You send the ETH to the exchange over Optimism, then withdraw it back out on Ethereum. That can work fine when you already have an exchange account and the withdrawal fee isn’t too high.

For a one-off transfer, I’d rather keep it straightforward and avoid moving the money through an exchange account just to get it onto another network. There are services made specifically for moving the same asset between chains, and that’s usually a cleaner way to handle this kind of transfer. You can, for example, use this bridge from Optimism here: https://defiway.com/bridges/bridge-eth-optimism-ethereum . Choose Optimism as the source network, Ethereum as the destination, and enter the amount of ETH you need to move. Before confirming, you can see the route and the amount expected to arrive on mainnet.