Native assets are those that originated on a specific chain. Example: ETH is a native asset on the ethereum blockchain. The ethereum blockchain is the source or native chain for ETH. Native assets are bridge through a lock and release mechanism. When a native asset is to be bridged to another blockchain, the native asset is locked on the source chain and a corresponding version of the asset is either unlocked or minted on the destination chain. Most native assets are wrapped on the destination chain by the mint
function, but in some cases, for assets like USDC where there reside a native version on the destination chain as well, the corresponding amount is unlocked from a pool of that native asset on the destination chain.