Rethinking user risks at L2BEAT

Devcon 7 · 12 Nov 2024 · 8:44

L2BEAT researcher Piotr Szlachciak examines emerging user-facing risks on Ethereum Layer 2s at Devcon 7, revisiting the risk framework the L2BEAT team uses to assess rollups.

Speakers

Topics

From Devcon 7, hosted by Ethereum Foundation.

Transcript

[Music] [Music] let me tell you a story and you're probably familiar with it you might have even lived this story yourself a young guy like you or me decides to bridge their tokens they take out their Hardware wallet connected to the computer go to the Bridge website and now they start sweating right they're bridging they they don't know what's going to happen they they they they make a transaction and the coins don't appear on the other

side what's going to happen what's going to happen 10 seconds pass the coins are on the other side the guy's saved right but actually not right then that's that's the funny thing we we think think that the only risks that we are exposed to are during the bridging and then we don't really think about the tokens that we get on the other side and so for example for bridges that lock and mint Tokens The Tokens can still be stolen on the original chain and for bridges that are liquidity networks well they still have to give you a token on the other side so this token still might be stolen

and you know we were sitting half a year ago in Budapest at an offsite for L2 beat and we were looking at our website and thinking you know those risks that we show they are really nice but they aren't really connecting with some people because they see what uh what we show they can see oh arbitrum this optimism this they can they can go dig deeper but it's not personal for them right they they don't have an ability to to see the actual things that they are exposed

to and and when we thought about how to solve this problem how to how to make something that will actually allow users to see the risks they were exposed to we we actually figured out that this thing would have to be for a different Target user and it would have to look completely different than l2b today so what I have for you today is a thing called insight and what Insight is is currently a demo that you can see on our boof but what it is also it is a way to see the risks for your specific wallet

so if you were to input your ens address or your ethereum sorry your ens name or your ethereum address there you would see a list of your tokens that you hold on different chains with the associated risks so now you no longer have to go to the L2 beat main page and figure out oh is this chain where I actually have my tokens is this bridge the one that I have used all this information is compiled for you and what we also show right on on the inside is the half that the token has taken through the different blockchains so you can actually see that the wbtc you're

holding on arbit room one has been bridged from ethereum but before it got to ethereum it has been locked on bitcoin and uh there is a multisig on ethereum that some permission custodians manage that actually takes care of those tokens and we hope this is this is an experiment that we're doing but we hope that maybe this will allow users to feel that the risks are actually affecting them see what risks they're actually exposed to and we're also thinking maybe we can suggest some mitigations one one

example would be you that you might be familiar with would be the usdc E and usdc tokens where the usdc token is the one that was bridged from ethereum while the usdc token is the one that's bridged through CCP or CCI the the the bridge from Circle itself so one has an additional trans assumption the other doesn't and I encourage you very much to go to our booth check out the demo play with it and thank you thank thank you very much Peter any questions for Peter O2

be I actually have a question because I use L2 beat a lot are you going to include uh me data on L2 on L2 be oh that's a very interesting question we haven't been exploring that site very much I think um it very much depends on the progress that the chains are going to make because the more progress the chain makes right for example right now we most of the rollups are stage zero there are a few that they are stage one and at those stages the thing that actually matters is the fact that the owners of those rollups can just upgrade it under you and just take all the money so the me is like a detail but it matters way less if we start seeing uh a

future where rollups are more and more decentralized then those topics would become more and more important because we can stop focusing on the trivial stuff and I think this will be a good point to start looking into this I see thank you a question hello are you planning to incorporate any um notification of uh scams after they happen in real time for specific Bridges this a very good question I think I think this is something that uh that we would like to do right uh it's uh very hard to detect this because you

never know what exactly is going to happen we have a monitoring infrastructure but it's still I guess run every other hour so it's not in real time uh maybe in the future our internal tooling would be sophisticated enough that we can you know detect those things and real time and then we would maybe send notifications that would be really fun do we have another oh there's another question there oh there sorry uh so right now you are only uh detecting famous dexes or like any Dex that will just pop up and someone brid through it in terms of what we show from the

risks right at L2 beat we analyze the the l2s uh not all of them are just dexes uh some of them are just general l2s meaning they can execute any evm code and for the tokens uh we we actually look at uh other risks for example the bridge risk so it's it's more than just taxes okay one last question at the back the gentleman there yeah I think of this similar to tools like revoke cach where you would manage your allowances so what's the original goal uh what was the original intention behind building this like what risks are you mitigating yeah the the main intention is is to make things personal right when when you go

to the L2 beat website the the things you see are very technical and also very specific to the projects right and and with this demo you can see the actual things that affect you without without seeing all the rest right so so the intention was to car to a different type of user uh that you know doesn't feel the connection with the main website that we have okay thank you so much Peter thank you so much good to know these new features from O2 beat our