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Why IBC is the best cross-chain protocol

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We need to trust minimal cross-chain protocols

The original title: "octopus network liu yi: the IBC is the gold standard across the chain agreement | work force think-tank roundtable of thought"

MiX

Original source: Octopus Network

On September 1st, the thought Roundtable hosted by the Computing Power Think Tank. Slibrary's Roundtalk "Bull is here, What's next? "Cross Chain to Web 3.0", invited Liu Yi, founder of Octopus Network, Hu Zhiwei, Director of Boundary Intelligence Research Institute, and Yan Pengyi, Director of NEAR Protocol Asia Project, to discuss the past and future of Cross chain.

Octopus network: Provides complete cross-chain interoperability for Substrate application chains

Frontier Intelligence Institute: focusing on Cosmos ecological cross - chain technology

NEAR Protocol: NEAR Rainbow Bridge is the first untrusted Ethereum bridge

Part1: What changes have taken place across the chain in 2021?

Octopus Network - Liu Yi

The IBC coming online this year is going to have a big impact across the chain, I think. IBC is the gold standard for cross-chain protocols. IBC can separate the Application layer from the transport layer and network layer (TAO, Transport, Authorization, Organization). IBC The SIMPLICITY and flexibility of the TCP/IP protocol, which defines how data is sent and received across the chain, is the TCP/IP protocol of blockchains.

Cross-chain Communication protocol & NBSP; IBC Is a reliable and secure protocol for inter-module communication (interoperability) that enables the reliable transfer, validation, and ordering of data across chains. Application scenarios include cross-chain asset transfer, atomic transactions, multi-chain smart contracts (with or without interworking virtual machines), and multiple forms of data and code sharding. Since the beginning of 2019, we have been focusing on cross-chain technology, working with Cosmos, Boundary Intelligence, and receiving funding from Cosmos Ecological Foundation ICF to implement IBC protocol on Substrate. But there were a lot of people who thought that bitcoin and Ethereum were all there was to the crypto world, so there was no need to cross the chain, at most there was a bridge between bitcoin and Ethereum.

Over time, more and more people realize that a single public chain cannot be optimal for all applications. In the future, there will be at least a few major public chain ecology, and projects in different fields and with different characteristics will choose their own public chain ecology for research and development and construction.

In April 2020, Octopus Networks submitted the GRANDPA Client proposal to become the IBC cross-chain communication standard, numbered ICS10. GRANDPA (Gghost - Based Recursive Deriving Prefix Agreement) is the final component of the consensus algorithm of Polkadot relay chain, and is adopted by many Substrate application chains. ICS10 defines the interaction between GRANDPA blockchain and other blockchains and is the basis for heterogeneous cross-chain implementation.

https://github.com/cosmos/ics/tree/master/spec/ics-010-grandpa-client

In addition to participating in protocol formulation, we have developed Substrate IBC module, Demo, CLI and other auxiliary tools, all of which are open source.

https://github.com/octopus-network/substrate-ibc

Now cross - chain has begun to move to a wide range of applications. Defi is currently the biggest application area, and we see a good combination of cross-chain and Defi, including cross-chain trading, lending and even derivatives markets. These application scenarios have actual demand and have attracted a large number of users, which indicates that cross-chain has entered the stage of large-scale application implementation.

Boundary Intelligence - Hu Zhiwei:

I think the most significant development is the IBC protocol. The IBC protocol will help interconnect many blockchains, allowing tokens to move freely and even cross-chain interactions between applications.

In addition to supporting cross-chain communication with Tendermint-based chains, IBC also supports heterogeneous chains. However, the specific implementation of the IBC protocol on these heterogeneous chains will vary. For example, Ethereum is a little different from the definition in the IBC model because of the nondeterministic consensus model of PoW, etc. This is Gravity Bridge. I'm doing right now. The other day, there was an announcement that Bitcoin could also be cross-linked to Cosmos, which I was very much looking forward to.

In addition, Teacher Liu Yi also mentioned that there are many EVM compatible chains this year. Some of these chains also present difficulties in enabling the IBC protocol. Because the IBC protocol has many layers designed for maximum compatibility, it may be difficult to implement them all for different chains.

On August 24, Frontier Intelligence released the pre-release V0.1.0 of the Compact IBC protocol (Terse IBC, hereinafter referred to as TIBC). TIBC simplifies IBC cross-chain communication protocol to quickly connect to heterogeneous chains, and adds cross-chain NFT, cross-chain smart contract invocation and other enhanced functions.

https://github.com/bianjieai/tibc-relayer-go/releases/tag/v0.1.0

NEAR- Yan Pengyi:

NEAR Protocol's Rainbow Bridge is a truly trust-free, permissionless, and universal product. This means that anyone can deploy, use, or join in the maintenance of an existing bridge without anyone else's approval -- you just have to trust the contract and the code.

The Rainbow Bridge is technically interesting: it not only supports the transfer and trading of assets, but also transmits information. For example, if we want to do a DAO on NEAR Protocol, you can get balances from Ethereum and then propose or vote on NEAR's DAO.

Bridges are decentralized and scalable by nature, so cross-chain Bridges can actually do a lot of things.

Part 2: How to balance the impossible triangle of blockchain

Octopus Network - Liu Yi

The impossible triangle of blockchain is the fundamental reason that "a single public chain cannot be optimal for all application scenarios". Decentralization, security and high performance constitute the "impossible triangle" of blockchain, which is in fact a very good thinking framework for blockchain design. A good chain needs to be balanced. Each chain will be designed according to its own application scenarios. It is impossible to fit all application scenarios.

For example, a 1,000 TPS BFT consensus chain, with different types of applications using different economic values, needs to compete with each other. A link game competing with a DeFi for even five TPS can cause fees to rise to several thousand dollars or more. This is clearly not a good solution.

If you want to build a factory in The real world, you don't want to build a factory in Manhattan or Pudong, you want to build a factory where the rent is cheap and the transportation is good.

Going back to encryption, the same is true. Financial products occupy the head of the main chain, which is the financial center of the crypto world. If you want to make an on-chain game, the best option is to customize one chain and use a cross-chain bridge to trade with other public chains. It is the same logic as building a factory in the suburbs and then trading its shares on an exchange.

In the crypto world, thousands or more applications will have their own custom app chains, and octopus networks are the result. In essence, octopus network is a hub, connecting different characteristics of chains through octopus cross-chain bridge, providing infrastructure services for different Web3.0 application innovation.

Boundary Intelligence - Hu Zhiwei:

The IBC protocol redefines the blockchain Internet and what blockchain cross-chains should be able to do by allowing chains to communicate with each other. The IBC protocol interconnects different chains, allowing their on-chain assets to move freely and even interact with other applications, and not necessarily through the Cosmos Hub.

IBC is now in the SDK built into Cosmos, and the Cosmos blockchain can be upgraded to be IBC compliant. Terra, for example, is expected to upgrade to IBC compatibility in early September.

NEAR- Yan Pengyi:

For users, we want the user experience to be as simple and straightforward as possible. For example, with the NEAR cross-chain to Ethereum Rainbow Bridge, users can log into metamsk's account on the web and directly receive a NEAR account, thus transferring assets from NEAR to Ethereum's wallet.

Not only that, the Rainbow Bridge is designed with multiple cross-chain application scenarios in mind, supporting not only the transfer of ERC20 tokens, but also the transaction NFT, as well as the transfer of information stored on the contract, such as the status or changes of the contract, etc. We made any information that could be cryptofically proven on NEAR also available in ethereum contracts (and vice versa), including reading the contract state on the other chain and calling the contract method on the other chain and receiving a callback. This means users can vote in NEAR's DAO with their ETH balance without having to send transactions on Ethereum. The same block headers for NEAR are validated on Ethereum based on solidity smart contracts.

Rainbow Bridge was designed for more cross-chain scenarios from the very beginning, because NEAR's sharding technology can support different application scenarios. For example, Octopus Network proposed the Starsea of application chain, allowing the chain to serve the application. Combining with Rainbow Bridge, we will see more and more application scenarios emerge.

Part 3: What will be the cross-chain trend next year?

Boundary Intelligence - Hu Zhiwei:

The IBC protocol now allows tokens to be freely transferred across different blockchains. But WHAT I'm looking forward to is more innovation in the application layer, such as the information that Liu talked about calling another contract. The hope is to provide more common application cross-chains through the underlying IBC protocol, and this interaction may lead to more synergies and composability between different chains. This proprietary + cross-chain direction of octopus networks could really impact the ecology and industry.

Octopus Network - Liu Yi:

When we talk about cross-chain, the hardest thing to do is not just develop a decentralized cross-chain bridge, but actually cross-chain benefits and application scenarios.

For example, there have been some interesting developments this year regarding very high cross-chain to Ethereum GAS charges. Bridges can be divided into two types: "trust-based chain Bridges" and "untrust-based chain Bridges".

- Trust-based cross-chain Bridges that require pre-registered inspectors to perform.

Avalanche's Bridge, which has just been updated to Avalanche Bridge (AB), is a new model in which witnesses use MPC, or multi-party security computing, to generate a private key fragment for signing a threshold signature, which turns a cross-chain transaction into a normal transaction and is very cost effective. At the same time, they use some TEE techniques to prove that the private key generation process is legitimate.

- Untrusted Bridges, where NEAR's Rainbow Bridge is the first untrusted Ethereum Bridge to go live and Cosmos's Gravity Bridge is the second.

These two Bridges make very interesting design choices. I think the main advantage of the Cosmos bridge is that you don't have to wait 16 hours to transfer money back to Ethereum from Cosmos because the bridge validates all the signatures, but the cost is still high.

NEAR's Rainbow Bridge also has a relative upgrade plan, but only if a widget is added to the consensus layer to generate and collect ecDSA-256K1 signatures that can be verified directly on Ethereum.

Illia and I also discussed another possibility: building a mechanism into the rainbow bridge to generate a raw ECD-SA signature. If this could be done, we wouldn't have to wait 16 hours.

For the future I would like to see more cost effective Bridges.

Also, Illia, the founder of NEAR, and I have been talking about NEAR & NBSP since Christmas; And & have spent Cosmos cross chain. Since both NEAR and Cosmos have reliable, efficient light clients, we expect to have a COSMs-Near cross-chain bridge based on the IBC protocol, which should be done within a year.

NEAR- Yan Pengyi:

NAER takes 16 hours to cross to Ethereum, which is limited by the speed of ethereum transactions. A very important upgrade to NEAR is expected in the fourth quarter of this year: In combination with the SECP256K1 signature algorithm, NEAR's Rainbow Bridge can perform block head validation very quickly. You can reduce the time taken by a NEAR transfer to Ethereum from 16 hours to 10 minutes, or even as little as 6 minutes.

On the other hand, I know that Octopus Network already Bridges with Cosmos, mainly through Octopus Relayer. This is & have spent NEAR Protocol Things that can be done with octopus networks not only to bring assets from octopus to Cosmos, but also to consider the possibility of making smart contracts interoperable.

Octopus networks are building a solid foundation for application chains at very low cost and very strong availability. With the launch of the Octopus Network Cross-chain Bridge, we are very much looking forward to cross-chain interoperability with NEAR Protocol, which will bring many innovations and brand new cases.

Octopus Network - Liu Yi:

Octopus Network's cross-chain bridge is very exciting, in order for octopus network and Direct correspondence, I and Illia NBSP; Lots of fun ways were discussed: for example an application could start a smart contract on NEAR first, seamlessly connect to the octopus network if they wanted to have their own chain, and all communication between smart contracts would be directly carried over by a bridge, which is a really cool idea. Also an application can migrate from the octopus network to NEAR's chain.

This means that the octopus network and the NEAR chain are fully compatible. Web3.0 applications only need to focus on their own business logic and their own assets. If the bridge is strong enough, it can also be operated directly on the NEAR chain, which may be the direction we go in the future.

Substrate IBC, which we have been trying to develop, is very important. The key component, Substrate IBC, will provide more cross-chain options for Substrate chains, which can be added to the Cosmos ecosystem, or they can be added to the octopus network, or they can remain in Polkadot Ecology. But either way, they can connect to other chains through the IBC protocol.