Liesl Eichholz : ChainBridge - Doing Business in a Multi-Chain World

Transcript

three sorry everyone will be with you in a sec i don't think this is doing anything yes you can go hurry cool uh do you want me to to start over or oh yes okay sorry i'll just give a quick intro again sorry everyone for the little technical hitch um so yeah my name is lisel i do business development at trainsafe and i'm gonna talk a little bit about chainbridge and what it means to do business in a multi-chain world and what this interoperability is going to do for the space so just a quick overview i'm just going to tell you a little bit about chain safe what we're working on our principles and

how we do business um then tell you a little bit about chainbridge and what the roadmap is for that and then the consequences of what this new version of chamber is going to do for the ecosystem and what decentralized bridging really means and will do so a little bit about chainsafe we're a toronto based blockchain development r d company but we're pretty much fully remote i myself am based in berlin and we're working on building all kinds of infrastructure for the web 3 space we are blockchain and technology agnostic so essentially we just look at projects measure them by the value that we think that they can

add to the ecosystem and we work on whatever we think is cool pretty much um this is uh what's really what's really core to our ethos and what attracted me to the team is that there's a really strong focus on the core principles um so we work on a lot of open source code and this really meshes with our values of openness and collaboration and freedom and that's something that we brought to chainbridge as well a little bit about what kind of stuff we do so we offer all kinds of research and development services for projects in the web3 ecosystem um we're working with companies in the space all the way from like web3 foundation ef to chain link and then a lot of smaller

companies as well that we work with so all across the span and aside from development services we also work on a few products ourselves uh so we're working on a few things for other other teams in the ecosystem so we're building lodestar which is an eth2 beacon chain implementation and typescript um gossamer which is a polkadot host implementation forest is a rust implementation for filecoin uh we're also building a russ implementation for the minute foundation so those are some of our internal sort of external products and then internally now we're also working on a few things so chainsaw files is an ipfs and filecoin pending service that has launched and should be coming to you all

very soon um we're also working on a gaming sdk that connects uh web 3 with the unity engine so that you can bring tokens and nfts into games especially like lots of mobile games that use unity and finally what i'm going to focus on today is chain bridge which some of you may have heard of it's a multi-chain multi-directional bridge so a little bit about what chainbridge is essentially it's a modular multi-directional blockchain bridge that allows data and value to transfer currently between evm compatible chains and hopefully in the future we'll be able to uh or definitely will be able to

integrate non-evm chains so at its core what it really is is a a message passing protocol where events on a source chain are used to send a message that is then routed via a relayer network to a destination chain and what we've what we've gone into in building this is uh is really focusing once again like i said on our core principles um so we built chain bridge in this image and we've got a quote here from our amazing ceo aiden um that that goes into the fact that rather than seeing this as a zero-sum game we want bridging infrastructure to exist for everyone and to improve the ecosystem at large so everything that we're looking at is it's not just

altruistic it should always obviously be able to support um economic principles but we really want the ecosystem as a whole to be like as open as possible a little bit about how it works uh so essentially when a user wants to transfer a token across um across from one chain to another they will transfer that token to the chainbridge contract and then that will emit a deposit event that relayers are listening for then those relayers will take one of the relays will pick up a transaction and create a proposal on the target or destination chain that again that then gets submitted for approval and all the other relayers will vote on that and finally once a certain threshold is

met then the proposal passes and the transaction gets executed on the destination chain so what would happen there is that a token would then be minted that's equivalent to the one that was locked up on the origin chain um or in the other direction that token would be burned and then the one on the origin chain would be unlocked i hope that makes sense anyone can jump in with questions at any time uh what we're looking at right now is that there are a few challenges in the current design that we that we've got released so we're working on improving a few things but right now the biggest challenges are first of all that it relies on trusted relays so every bridge that gets set up has to have has to sort of find and manage

their own relays which is something that we've been helping our partners do um but it requires a certain amount of overhead and it's one of the areas where we can improve on trustlessness and decentralization it makes it a little bit more difficult to scale the ecosystem and to deploy as many bridges as are needed the read layer sets because of this are also often quite small and have admin permissions which means that we're not at a stage yet we're fully happy with how secure users funds are and we'd like it to be a lot more trustless and more decentralized another consequence of this is that relays have to essentially be trusted parties and we have to trust them to behave honestly there are some

incentives in place to prevent them from acting maliciously but currently there's no financial incentive which as we've seen in the in the web 3 design space is one of the biggest ways to make people behave as you want so we're working on that a second challenge is that right now there are isolated instances of the so each bridge is mostly standalone requiring like i said its own relay set and if you want to be able to bridge between multiple chains through one set of smart contracts then this relies on the admins of that bridge essentially adding that functionality so we want anyone to be able to deploy a bridge between any two chains and if that a bridge is currently deployed between that one and another

one then it will provide instant compatibility between all of them one other challenge is that it currently requires permissions from the relayers to add tokens so what essentially happens is if i'm transferring a token from chain a to chain b then that token contract whether it's erc20 or 721 needs to exist on the destination chain to preserve the logic and the functionality of whatever that token is so these all have to currently be approved the the contracts have to be deployed on the destination chain by the relayers so right now what we want to do is figure out a way to get all of those contracts deployed and preserve functionality for these tokens while they move across chains

um where we are headed so i've talked a little bit so far as i've been going through the challenges in terms of what we want to do to to improve the the bridge the biggest one being getting a trustless relay asset so in the future we see there being a single relayer set that supports all bridges between all of the chains that we support which will be many by hopefully in a short amount of time so essentially there'll be a greater focus on on streamlining transfers between as many chains as possible so that all these bridges don't have to be built one to one every time and we think this trustlessness is really important as obviously most people within the

blockchain space because it involves people's finances and users are exposing themselves to risks every time they use an application like this they're locking up money in a smart contract that they need to be able to trust so when they trust this system that will protect their funds they essentially need it to be as trustless as possible so that they don't get rugged essentially um so the way we're thinking of trustlessness in this context is a system where the end user doesn't necessarily need to trust any single participant or any group of participants in the network because the economics and the cryptography and the network as a whole will make sure that their funds are secure and the new designs that we're working on for chainbridge uh

will essentially make this a reality uh the next thing that we want to look at doing is making it easier to integrate future chains um basically each newly integrated change should always be able to interact with all of the existing chains in the ecosystem and through the single relay set we want to make it so that anyone can just spin up a bridge as easily as possible and plug in directly without having that friction of having to to set up their own system and finally again this is all kind of connected but having modular security um so obviously the single relay set will allow people to opt in to like a much more secure pool but we're also looking at a bunch of different ways to make the network more

secure and protected against attacks the decentralized relay network specifically should protect against malicious relayers which is currently not something that is as protected as as it could be in future designs and also people spinning up bridges with malicious intent and adding their own malicious relays in there so hopefully with the uh with the new design we should be able to prevent people from creating bridges that are designed essentially to scam cool so then what does all of this mean what does a decentralized chain bridge mean for the ecosystem uh i think it's important to touch on what interoperability really means in the ecosystem and why it's so important so you'll be seeing in the in the

schedule right now that a large proportion of the talks this year are about interoperability and about bridging and i think that's because creating a secure cross chain bridge is one of the most important milestones in the industry right now it's something that almost everyone is looking into or if they're not looking into building it themselves and they're looking at how to get somebody to help them with it and interoperability is this problem that kind of touches on a whole lot of different parts of the space it touches on scalability it touches on ux custodianship all of these things that that cross chain bridging involves really come down to core solutions in the space that will be helpful not just for the end user but also for a lot of infrastructure to be built

so some of the consequences that we see of uh being able to deploy something like this uh first of all as i've just touched on is scaling so obviously we all know what the what the difficulties can be in having a few chains that attract all of the interest in the space it means that scalability is poor costs are high transaction costs are way over what somebody should be expecting to be paying so if we can see all of these different chains rather than scaling on a layer one basis being able to all feed into part of a larger ecosystem by being able to bridge between all of these chains then the ecosystem as a hail as a whole can scale even if layer ones aren't necessarily scaling at that same pace another important thing will be having

blockchain state available on lots of different chains this is for example something that you can see being important in layer twos like optimism so interoperability being about more than just token transfers means that other kinds of assets whether they're nfts governance rights loan contracts will all need to be transferred between chains but also they'll need to be asset agnostic transfers that essentially yeah preserve and allow you to transfer state rather than just transferring assets so the new version of chainbridge that we're building will eventually be able to support um cross-chain transfers of state with a

goal to eventually supporting cross-chain applications that can just easily run between a bunch of different another thing sort of again touched on this already being um cross-functional bridges so right now we're seeing a lot of people deploying bridges specifically for their individual use cases and what we want to be able to do is have bridges that that get deployed have excellent security have trusted reputations have been audited that everybody can come and jump on and use without necessarily having to spin up their own bridge just for their single application so the new designs that we're that we're making for chain bridge will be able to support this ecosystem where anyone can essentially come and piggyback on infrastructure that's already been built rather than having to

work on it on their own um and yeah this will essentially make costs slower for everybody make like implementation and development and deployment maintenance costs all of that much lower and essentially just increase sustainability and interoperability final thing i don't know if any of you have seen but lots of cross-chain solutions these days are being hacked i think 4chain any swap couple of other ones have have suffered some pretty bad attacks in the past few weeks so what we're trying to do with chain bridges also make it as absolutely secure as possible and prevent these kind of attacks from happening having an ecosystem of a lot of of different chain

chains and bridges is also really important for being able to sort of spread the attack surface but also within chain bridge we're going to make sure that all of the contracts are heavily audited and there's going to be incentives in the ecosystem through our decentralized relay network and also just through our own grassroots efforts to make sure that it's as secure as possible that it's been audited properly and that funds continue to be put towards maintaining security um obviously having this decentralized model that i've talked about will also prevent against attacks that come from there being centralization so i've touched on a few of those but yeah essentially the security will make this interoperability in the ecosystem even better um and ultimately i think

that there being trust and interoperability in the ecosystem gives people more room and more time and more resources and energy to be able to focus not on bridging themselves but to be able to focus on building cross-chain applications on building things that move across a whole lot of different chains and make the most of all the different chains that we have in the ecosystem and just generally increase uh innovation overall in the space so hopefully with the with what we're building we'll be able to yeah bring everyone closer to that multi-chain future that's me [Applause] quickly yeah if you want to learn more

go to the go to the url but questions yes um i don't i don't know if you covered this so if you did i apologize for the redundancy but how do you incentivize the relayers so that you ultimately get towards that more secure set of single relayers that you're talking about yeah so currently we're still like in in a research phase and figuring out exactly what the relay incentives will be we're learning from a lot of mistakes that have been made well i shouldn't say mistakes but learning experiences that have been made in the past by other projects and by ourselves and uh we're trying to figure out like right now whether or not there needs to be a token for that or how we do that but essentially having some financial

stake that the relayers have to put up will be the one of the predominant ways um yeah sorry i can't i can't answer more like right now but we'll be releasing information on it soon so there should be a clearer answer then any other questions thanks um you mentioned that you think it's beneficial to have like many different chains to spread the risk kind of i'm wondering if if there are many different bridges they will i guess all mint their own type of token their own representation uh on the target chain isn't that a bit of a problem that you also then spread

have like many different tokens that actually represent the same thing yeah i mean the the way that this one or that our bridge works specifically is you will have i i think i'm getting what you mean here where like tokens will be locked up in order to be minted on a new chain so it's not like you're duplicating value in the ecosystem you're just moving it from one place to another yes but but what i mean if you have multiple different bridges then you will have um like ease a and efb and evc on on the target chain kind of because you have bridge a and bridge b and bridge c and these will be technically different tokens so okay i see what you mean yeah i mean our goal is to create incentives that

mean that people don't deploy a lot of different bridges all to the same chain so what we're aiming to do is create an ecosystem where there is preferably like one or two or maybe only a handful of bridges to any given chain or from any given chain and that rather than deploying the smart contracts for chain bridge over and over again on one chain that those will all just be used like as a singular one obviously we can't prevent anyone from just deploying their own instance but the incentives that we're building mean that that won't really make a lot of sense okay thanks do you support limitations in tokens so

for example if i have a token that is whitelisted and i keep the whitelist or somehow managed so that i can force transfer from this token do you also support such a functionality and how do you how do you support it on different bridges if i try to bridge such an organ like a blacklisted token or white yeah uh so under the current implementation uh essentially the the relayers on any given bridge get to decide which tokens can be transferred because they have to deploy the token contracts to the destination and like origin chain depending on whether the token is bridging from so at this stage it's at the relay level

but as we decentralize there will it'll essentially still be at the relay level but they will be able to vote on which token contracts get deployed but do you support like for example if i keep a whitelist for my token on mainnet and i bridge it somewhere else and i have to sing the white list as well do you support something or not yes so we support arbitrary message transfers essentially so like any data that's associated with where the token can be transferred alongside it okay thank you one more there yeah um hey uh i'm curious if you could just like talk

more about security in general with um yeah with this bridge solution and especially like i don't know do you have any thoughts on how to reconcile like open source values when developing like this solution that like um obviously can make people more vulnerable to hacks and it's happening a lot in the space um yeah it's not a like clear quest i just want to know if you have more thoughts on that to share yeah i mean i think in terms of the the open sourcing in general you know there's there's always like the risk that someone will take what you've built and use it maliciously i mean one of the things i i find myself having to explain weirdly often is that open

source doesn't mean open license so people can technically use the code and do malicious stuff with it but they're not necessarily allowed to you know whether you're going to chase them up for that sort of depends on on how egregious what they're doing is but yeah you know it's not like open source gives everybody full freedom to to do whatever terrible things they want with it um and in terms of security like on on the bridge more specifically i think yeah right right now um you know the the contracts that we have on chain like are audited and as sort of as secure as one can reasonably be um in you know in the blockchain space in general i think where the real security benefits will come from is

in improving the decentralization on the relayer layer so yeah on on the blockchains like you kind of have a like a baseline level of security guarantees just because of the the like economics of how they're designed but it's up to us as a team to figure out like what the protocol level economics and like incentives and security um looks like on the relay level because that's really where we're doing like yeah most of the innovation but yeah tbc um i was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how like

the fees would work for bridging to from one chain to another like would you be paying the let's say i'm bridging from eth to polka dot would have would i be paying the e fees and then the relayers are in charge of the dot fees or like how does work essentially yeah so currently right now you obviously have to pay a a gas fee in order to like say if you're if you're transferring something from ethereum you have to pay a gas fee in order to deposit your tokens into the um into the chain bridge contract where they get locked um at this at this stage the relayers will take um a fee that is is decided by them in advance so across different chains it differs i

mean different bridges sorry but yeah at this at this stage those fees are fixed by the relays and they're taken um essentially in whatever they choose so right now like i'll give ethereum avalanche for as an example um the the relays will take if you're transferring from ethereum to um avalanche or take avax if you're transferring back the other way but once we have a a decentralized model it's essentially like i mean the sky's the limit in terms of innovation as to how you do fees um so yeah it could it could just be like the easiest uh situation to have like a portion of what you're sending of what you're bridging gets like taken by the relays um yeah there's there's no concrete decision get on how that's done but that's also

something that governance on the relay level will be able to decide um i'm just conscious of time here i don't know when the next person is so okay i'll i'll leave you to it then cheers everyone