Snowbridge mini-update for Q1 2023
Hey folks, I'm the tech lead for Snowbridge, the trustless bridge to Ethereum. Just a short update from our side, as I know we've been fairly quiet on our progress. As you may know, its been over a month since we received our treasury funding to launch as a common-good Ethereum bridge on Kusama and Polkadot: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referendum/88.
We're soon going to prepare our quarterly report for Q1 2023, and hope to share it within the next few weeks. Until that's ready, here's a quick summary of our progress so far:
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We've been very busy re-architecturing our bridge for deployment on BridgeHub. This includes support for XCMv3 and its native bridging capabilities via the
ExportMessageinstruction. Our Solidity contracts are nearly done as per https://github.com/Snowfork/snowbridge/pull/781, and we are moving next onto development of the BridgeHub pallets. -
On the light client front, our Ethereum light client is still under heavy development. Particularly in light of the security vulnerabilities raised in https://forum.polkadot.network/t/decentralized-dot-eth-bridges-a-comparison-thread/777/29?u=vincent. We'll share more details in the upcoming report.
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Final deployment of the bridge on Kusama still depends on some projects from Parity and W3F. These include BEEFY and BLS host functions. For Polkadot deployment, we also require Gov2 to be in place.
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On the team front, we've hired another developer (Ron Yang) to help out with our ethereum light client.
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We're hoping to launch on Kusama in June 2023, and on Polkadot in August 2023. This is 3 month-delay compared to our original estimate in our treasury proposal. These delays are due to (1) and (2).
Anyway, hope to share our Q1 report soon. Stay tuned!
Comments (2)
To address the elephant in the room, many of you may have read James Prestwich's article on flaws in the protocol our Ethereum light client relies upon: https://prestwich.substack.com/p/altair We broadly agree with James's concerns. That said, we still think that overall our light client technology still offers greater security than the competition - multisig bridges such as Wormhole and Axelar. Our analysis on the above position is still in review. We want to make sure there are no edge cases we may have missed. We'll share it in the next week or two.
Some links: