Cross-Chain Bridge | Litepaper
Version 2.3 - June 20th, 2022
Connecting blockchains for full interoperability
Introduction
The Cross-Chain Bridge is a liquidity-pool-based, security-focused bridge and (in the future) community-governed bridging protocol to connect an increasing number of blockchains and, eventually, all major blockchains with each other. The protocol incentivizes providing liquidity for both projects and end users as well as provides a seamless bridging experience for tokens and NFTs - by bringing fee participation, yield farming, self-listings for projects and building other innovative features into the world of bridges. The Smart Contracts have been extensively audited, both internally and externally (by Chainsulting & Haechi).
The Cross-Chain Bridge bridging Smart Contracts are covered in this GitBook documentation. As a next step, Cross-Chain Bridge will offer interoperable Smart Contracts for cross-chain calls. The goal is that third-party developers will be able to interact with the bridging Smart Contracts in any of their dApps, network-independent, for any use case. Imagine if you could connect your Ethereum Wallet to a Solana dApp, or use your Binance Smart Chain tokens on a Polygon DEX, or pay with your Binance Smart Chain tokens in an e-commerce or onsite shop that only accepts payments on the Ethereum Blockchain. Or play Polygon-based play-to-earn games with your NFTs being in your (insert any network here) Wallet.
This is the vision, as this is where crypto mass-adoption will eventually come from. Blockchains need to be connected and the user should not need to worry where the tokens are or go to - users should just connect the preferred wallet of choice and pay/play/trade/etc in any dApp/network seamlessly. The magic behind this is the bridging layer - this key component has been building for years now and is at the forefront of development.
Why Cross-Chain Bridge v2.0?
Bridging fungible or non-fungible tokens is a laborious process. There are a variety of bridges that focus on connecting selected networks or support only specific tokens. As a user, you need to know which token you want to move over which bridge to another network. The Cross-Chain Bridge v2.0 has an ambitious goal: It should be possible to move any token to almost any network.
The Cross-Chain Bridge will attract and incentivize all players to participate in the ecosystem. Similar to projects launching tokens on Uniswap or a DEX, communities and/or creators will be able to add their own token via the Cross-Chain Bridge intuitively and permissionlessly, benefiting from greater accessibility and security. Meanwhile, projects along with their communities will be incentivized to provide liquidity with a fee-participation incentive.
Existing problems with bridges
There have been a couple of early efforts to connect blockchains. The following are the main issues which were identified:
- Bridge contracts require a minting permission (increased hack risk)
- Lack of decentralization
- Missing self-listings
- No yield for liquidity that projects provide in bridges
- No community-sourced bridge liquidity
- Missing Stablecoin support
- No NFT support
How the Cross-Chain Bridge v2.0 works
The Cross-Chain Bridge solves the issues above through the following key attributes:
- (Fungible) Token bridge using liquidity pools with a flexible deposit & claim approach and a limited hack risk compared to bridges with minter roles
- Bridging support for ETH, BNB, MATIC, AVAX & FTM networks
- Incentive for projects to use the Cross-Chain Bridge as they earn yield on the liquidity they provide themselves through fee-participation in the Liquidity Mining Pools.
- Incentives for community-sourced bridge liquidity as everyone can earn part of the protocol incentive or bridging fees from the Liquidity Mining Pools or for BRIDGE token holders, they can access the more attractive Reward Pools.
- Multi-Signature validation instead of using Key-Sharing wallet for the oracles
The following sections will delve deeper into how these attributes are implemented.
Last modified 7d ago