How Bridges Are Making Blockchain Seamless / Andreas Fletcher

Transcript

foreign my name is Andreas um I work for Beamer Bridge which is a fast and secure token bridge for roll-ups ethereum two Roll-Ups Roll-Ups two roll-ups and I'm going to talk about how bridges make blockchains seamless today the importance of bridges and this is one of the best cities that I can actually talk about the importance of bridges because there's a lot of bridges in Prague and this isn't in regards to crypto but just like let's think about what are bridges in our daily life and how important are they and just imagine that starting from today you wouldn't be able to walk over a bridge anymore how much restrictions you would have

a lack of liquid lack of connectivity cities would suffer because infrastructures would collapse Etc so in our daily life bridges are very important to grow the overall Market but also to make lives easier of people so if we look into crypto especially ethereum if you look at the road map of ethereum for the next three years there's no other scaling solution other than Roll-Ups and this means that we will result in an overall fragmentation of the ecosystem if we do not concentrate on making connections between these roll ups the

one thing that I do want to point out is that l1s and especially the connections to the Roll-Ups do have their limitations that's why we do have alternative l1s Martin krupperman had a great presentation called the limitations of Roll-Ups where he explains why Roll-Ups cannot be the future or the pure future of ethereum and scaling and the limitations and also then the benefits of alternative l1s but that's a different topic overall so the importance of bridges that we have within the crypto space is that overall it fights against the fragmentation that we're creating through roll ups and side chains to overcome the limitations that users have

users get more and more confused of where their assets are where the adapts are that they want to interact with or where they have to interact where they have to interact with and therefore bridges are basically a supportive role for the overall ecosystem to make the experience of users seamless the problem is that Bridges also have a big responsibility that they're actually not taking so would you as a person walk over these style of bridges without having a bad gut feeling probably not I wouldn't maybe the left one definitely not the right one the

problem in crypto is that all bridges say that they're the best Bridges out there they're fast they're secure they're trustless and they don't actually communicate the limitations that they have but just want to attract users investors Etc so this provides a huge attack Vector for users resulting in losing a lot of assets and you can see that within the attack Vector space of defy bridges are at the top place and so they've been more loss of funds by attacking Bridges than any other D5 sector overall

the question is why are bridges doing this or why do we have this problem and for being in a blockchain space we sure have a lot of triangles to explain stuff but basically it's all about the right one you have to find a compromise between security speed and cost because you cannot provide a technical solution that facilitates all of these three components and if you talk to a typical user he will always want to tend to the solution that is cheap because the security parameters is not in his head he will always think that my assets will be moved in some way and that's why

if you know if I go to an aggregator where I have the list of a lot of bridge options users will typically choose the one that they have to pay less transactions for rather than maybe doing research on the bridge and thinking about which one is actually the most secure one and then the question is why are bridges doing this overall so why are bridges not saying hey we're actually centralized so if you want to bridge you have to trust us but we're honest um it's easier to fake it until you make it and so bridging and creating Bridges is very complex and it's very hard um and the honesty doesn't attract the users it don't detract the VCS um

the white paper is written so they do plan to implement it in future was just more complicated than they originally anticipated um and overall token Bridging the same as other side chains Etc is race if you're not fast in providing some type of product to the user that they can use you'll lose to your competition because the overall the dapps the aggregators will focus on bridges that actually can facilitate the move of assets even if it's maybe not as secure as another Bridge so they they're trying to basically race each other so they're making compromises and the overall ecosystem is also a

little bit fragmented in terms of what you agree on on how to define what a good bridge is so the most misleading metric for example is tvl so the total value locked within one bridging protocol because a lot of people look at tvl as like a security metric they look how much tvl is locked in the bridge but in honesty it doesn't have any implications of how secure the bridge is itself even if the bridge concept is secure the contract concept could still be unsecure because there might be any some bugs within the contract and I'm not saying that we can prevent this completely but my question

overall and I'm happy to discuss this off after the talk that I have why do we need for example the last one 332 times the amount of value locked than we need in a 24-hour volume transfer and so we have so much liquidity locked in these bridges that we could use for other things for example more nodes for ethereum more validator notes for ethereum there's just no Capital efficiency in this system so my question is why why are we doing this we don't need that much what we do need is we need access to liquidity so it never should be that the user results in a problem that he cannot but because there's no liquidity in the

system but we don't need a lock we just need it available and that's why also my ask to you and to the live streaming audience and overall and the ecosystem and also if you're building a bridge or if you want to use a bridge try to understand what you're using there are beautiful resources out there l2beads has a beautiful section of scaling and bridging they describe what the risk parameters are how the concept Works um how the messages are being actually transmitted so that people can move tokens and li-fi one of the biggest aggregators out there has also a lot of content pieces they actually released a Block series this week of explaining a lot of

bridges and going into a very detailed scope of how they work and what the security parameters are also so that you don't have to understand necessarily what lgbts has in their images but in a very clear and written form so we have a need for Bridges and we have the problem that bridges are not as not as transparent but there are also some problems it still indicates that we have a huge need for the benefits of bridges because through the overall segregation of the liquidity that we have by having more and more Roll-Ups by having more and more side chains

Bridges provide a solution to unlock use cases for users that they cannot use on ethereum for example they have to go to a roll up to trade mint nfts Etc because ethereum might be just too expensive it also overall provides a better space for Innovative or innovation in general designing new Concepts on how you can secure Bridge transfers Etc so the the question is how will Bridges make or how do Bridges make blockchain seamless currently the answer is arbitrary messaging Bridges and arbitrary messaging bridges are basically

Bridges or protocols that do not only transfer tokens but they are actually able to transfer much more information so that the user itself or himself or herself does not necessarily need to think about what bridge or what side chain I am currently on and one of the the interesting and trending words that we have here currently is this intent-driven um motivation of a user a user wants to do something within crypto but he doesn't actually care where his assets are he just wants to be able to use the his assets to do a certain thing to Mint an nft to trade on a decks and bridges

are basically making this possible bypassing more than just the tokens but actually more information that then executes contracts on other chains so we have to think Beyond token transfers or token Bridges we have to think about more the arbitrary messaging component and one of the examples that we have is acceler technology they're basically a sidechained for themselves and they have gateways or Gateway contracts deployed on multiple roll apps and multiple side chains also and they have a proof of stake consensus running on their own chain that basically listens to the contracts and what is happening on the contract and if they've reached a specific minority then

they also execute whatever call data is provided or token or are provided um and this is just one overall example of it as I mentioned I work for uh Beamer on the Venture lead we are the most secure and fastest token Bridge currently and we're now working on arbitrary messaging we can do roll it up to ethereum transfers within 25 seconds and if you do have any questions or want to talk about more how block how bridges are making blockchain seamless here are my contact informations but I'm also here questions no questions that's fine one question

two questions hi um thanks for the presentations very interesting um I just want to make a quick comment about the point you you touched on about liquidity efficiency with the bridged um asset um they essentially act as um collaterals for the targeted you know mint on the other chain isn't it so they're one-on-one in terms of efficiency is actually already pretty high and you come into a landing protocol you get like one on 0.5 if the TV or if the long-term rate uh value of ratio allows isn't it but my question is that um with your product how does the message in passing works and who are

passing them and what's the benefit of your solution so Beamer Bridge specifically okay so what we use is optimistic proof that's why we only work or Deploy on Roll-Ups that are that have their data available data availability on ethereum a user basically sends token to a contract on the source chain and then an agent which we don't have a centralized liquidity so we don't have tvl we have decentralized liquidity where multiple players can manage the liquidity themselves and then match a request and once they match the request they will provide the tokens on the target chain to the

user and this is done within 20 seconds so the user doesn't have to deal with any problems afterwards the user has their tokens on the target chain in 20 seconds then what happens is we have a 24 hour lock period where the other agents can basically check on what he has done is correct and if they believe that something went wrong they start an escalation game up to the point where they say we want to basically use ethereum and the data that is on ethereum to resolve the dispute and then it gets written onto Earth L1 ethereum and then either the person who said that you've done something wrong is right or wrong and then they lose the stake of what they basically staked

okay hi um I have other conceptual question have you considered that once we like really stabilize this this whole topic for the bridges among chains that we could consider the traditional Finance as some other chain to be breached to the tradition so in fact replacing ramps yeah so I started working in crypto 2012 and I was working for the biggest Stock Exchange in Europe Deutsche Baza and the the one thing and that's also one of the reasons why I left um that space is that blockchain provides a beautiful tool to eliminate

the trust factor of a centralized party and we are now trending back into a space where we see more and more trust vectors introduced back into crypto I mean one of the best examples is the one hour downtime of arbitrum yesterday because they didn't have enough gas in their node which means that in concept this thing is purely centralized huh um and arbitrine was done for one hour so I'm not a fan of introducing more components that result in the centralization part of a one trusted entity it looks a little bit different if we have like assets moving on chain that you can't actually represent on-chain

because they're living in a in an outside world and there you will always need a trusted party that basically provides the guarantee that the value on chain is actually the value outside chain and and I that's fine my opinion but everything that you can do on chain everything that you can prove on chain and there are a lot of things that we can prove on chain we should be able to prove on chain and people shouldn't run shortcuts to Just Launch a product that potentially results in people losing their funds so we should focus on prioritizing decentralization and the the not having the need of centralized parties introducing trust vectors that we can avoid does it answer your

question okay just to follow up on that uh that basically means you don't trust in any thing we currently build because everything basically Builds on trust currently all of D5 is trust based if we talk about it very long discussion yeah um happy to also do that offside yeah I don't agree with that everything is related on centralized trust currently there is a tendency that this is being done again yeah

um yeah but I do hope that this is not going to be the next 10 years of crypto because then we're going in the wrong way thank you [Music]