ABCDE Capital Investment Research Partner: Interpretation of Interoperability Development Trends

ABCDE Capital

23-05-04 16:09

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Original source: Lao Bai, Partner of ABCDE Capital

Today, we will talk about some current trends in interoperability. The main direction of interoperability must be bridges. When the concept of bridges first came out, the industry roughly divided them into three categories. One is the external validator (represented by Multichain) The second is the light client (represented by Cosmos) The third is liquidity network + atomic swap (represented by Celer).

In theory, the light client is the safest, because it is completely trustless, but there are too few adaptation scenarios, so it is often limited to local ecology, liquidity network + atomic swap because of hash time The lock technology is basically relatively safe, but the experience is average, and the supported currencies are also limited. So you will find that the most used bridges on the market are based on external verifiers. After all, this is the most flexible, most convenient, and supports the most scenarios.

And even though multi-signature, MPC, TSS and other technologies are used to help out, the bridge using external validator technology has still become the hardest-hit place for hacking incidents, none of them (such as Ronin, such as Wormhole) At present, there are several categories of new exploration directions.

The first category, new interoperability technologies.

ZK is undoubtedly the key breakthrough direction. When you can quickly generate ZK proofs for behaviors on one chain and be quickly verified by another chain, this Interoperability can basically be considered as "safely connected."

Essentially speaking, ZK-Rollup is an expansion solution that opens up interoperability between L1 and L2, but Because L1-L2 is isomorphic, it is very convenient to verify, but it is much more difficult for non-isomorphic chains to verify each other's ZK proofs.

Currently there are several companies that are working on ZK bridges.

Polyhedra - This is the first batch of Portfolios of ABCDE, ZK Bridge is the main product of the project, using innovative ultra-fast The Devirgo protocol + recursive proof function can currently generate block header Snark proofs for most blockchains within 10 seconds, and it only takes 200kgas to verify on the EVM compatible chain.

Succinct Labs - has launched an available Telepathy protocol, and currently implements other EVM compatible chains to verify information on ETH with one phase, including

1. From Ethereum Send messages to any EVM chain.

2. Request arbitrary Ethereum data from any EVM chain.

3. Access Ethereum consensus data at the execution layer.

In addition, there are Electron Labs, which first proposed the concept of ZK-IBC, and Polymer, which also focuses on ZK-IBC. I am not sure where their progress is. If you know the old iron, please let me know.

The second category is the bridge based on optimistic assumption

One is the optimistic assumption that "the oracle and the Relayer node will not collude". We all know, Layer0, no more details The other is to use the OP Rollup mechanism on the bridge. First, assume optimistically that there is nothing wrong with us, that no one does evil and no one makes mistakes, and then give a window period to allow node detection and challenges. If nothing happens during the window period, it will be completely Settle, in my impression, is mainly done by Orbiter and Nomad.

The third category is not considered a bridge, but some protocols of the liquidity sharing layer - DAMM.

Proposed by Luyin and Starkware in 21 years, the asynchronous liquidity sharing of each ZK Rollup L2 is realized through the shared L1+ZK technology, and the liquidity of multiple L2s is solved Fragmentation problem, but two years have passed and it seems that I haven't seen the latest Update and progress. If you know the old iron, please let me know. I think it will be very useful if it is feasible.

Intercommunication is called Shared Sequencer.

Isn’t RAAS popular now? Naturally, someone will do the shared sequencer. It’s a bit like when the website first became popular, everyone used shared hosting servers to build themselves Company or personal homepage.

This is a branch of the decentralized Sequencer, but I personally think that several mainstream L2s are like OP, Arb, etc. I will participate in this method, because Sequencer's rights and profits are too great, which is equivalent to a country's army + taxation system. It is impossible for a big country to outsource this kind of thing, and you can see it from the OP's roadmap. Although the decentralization of Sequencer will definitely be done, the priority is not high, and it has been scheduled to the end of 24 years.

Therefore, some games and social Gamefi Appchain may use this shared Sequencer, and use the RAAS infrastructure to directly access Shared Sequencer provided by some RAAS. Then this shared Sequnencer is equivalent to a node processing many chains, and naturally these chains also realize atomic cross-chain interoperability on the Sequencer. Currently, two projects in this direction are Astria and Espresso.

The fifth category uses some extended data of the DA layer + Rollup to achieve a Trustless cross-chain similar to ZK-Bridge.

ZK is not needed yet, it sounds relatively Fancy. However, the project team does not intend to disclose the technical details and white papers yet, and I dare not really vote for them until I understand the technical details and feasibility, so I am stuck here, which is embarrassing...

The sixth category, completely abandon the concept of bridge

Directly perform operations on other chains through cryptography , this is what ICP is currently doing. At present, BTC has just been opened up, and BTC can be directly received, held and sent on the container. Based on this, they also created a decentralized Mint contract ckBTC, which feels a bit like the previous one to me. renBTC, but the trust level of nodes is completely replaced by the ICP network. It is expected that they can get through ETH in the future.