Deploying cross-chain bridges to relatively unknown teams, how should we interpret the actions of zkSync?

Author: Haotian (@tmel0211)

According to the ZK Credo manifesto, @zksync has recently decentralized its Ecosystem Portal, Block Explorer, and official Cross-Bridge, and open-sourced these core components for third-party technology providers to offer services. However, what is puzzling is that the "official cross-chain bridge" involving significant asset deposit and withdrawal channels has been entrusted to the relatively unknown @TxFusion_io. Why? How should we interpret this?

Generally speaking, auxiliary product functions such as ecological data analysis services and browsers are usually provided by community builders, such as Etherscan behind mainstream public chain projects like Ethereum. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand that zkSync entrusts ecological DApp data analysis and ranking, as well as browser presentation, to well-known third-party technical teams such as Dappradar and l2scan.

This can achieve win-win complementary advantages. Matter labs can focus on technology development and the promotion of ZK Stack technology architecture, including shared components such as Sequencer and zkPorter. This is beneficial for both the community and the team.

Because there are many teams in the blockchain community that provide data analysis services, such as Dune Analytics, 0xScope, Nansen, etc., their biggest pain point is the business model. The charging model for C-end is difficult to cover high operating costs, and for B-end services, most project parties are accustomed to doing it themselves and are unwilling to hand it over to others, which makes it difficult for a large number of data service companies to survive. If a large number of project parties follow the example of zkSync, it will bring new opportunities to these types of technology service companies, but I will not go into detail here.

However, the "official cross-chain bridge", a technical component that is crucial for layer2 asset security, has been entrusted to a new startup called TxFusion by zkSync. I have searched for a lot of information, but I have not been able to uncover the significance of TxFusion. However, I have discovered several interesting points.

1. The first TxFusion blog was released on February 21st of this year, without disclosing any investors and with a relatively vague team. However, the opening article mentions a collaboration with zkSync, indicating that TxFusion may have been created specifically for zkSync.

2. TxFusion founder Ines Isliami has had experience in data-related industries since 2020, working for blockchain-related companies such as Blockchain Collective, HyperGrowth, and Shard Labs. However, the duration of her employment in these industries has been relatively short.

3. TxFusion founder Ines Isliam has a video interview that sounds very similar to zkSync founder Alex in terms of accent, both are estimated to be Russian.

Currently, I only see this news, so I am puzzled as to why zkSync would hand over the cross-chain bridge to TxFusion. However, as a blogger who has been following zkSync's developments for a long time, I personally understand the motivation behind it and will briefly share it:

The kernel is that zkSyn does not want to acknowledge the existence of the "official cross-chain bridge" at all.

On the one hand, because cross-chain bridges are the L2 security lifeline. Simply put, any asset circulating on L2 is in the form of a wrapped mapped asset. Any asset circulating on L2, whether it is attacked by hackers or subjected to a rug pull, is restricted as long as it can be withdrawn by the "hacker" back to the main chain.

Rollup mainnet contracts can easily block the flow of suspicious L2 assets back to the mainnet through updates, thereby controlling unexpected abnormal situations. Most mainstream layer2 solutions now have a Security Council in place, with the primary responsibility of the multisig committee being to decide whether to upgrade the contract to control suspicious assets during a crisis. However, the upgradability feature reserved by Rollup contracts has been criticized for being too centralized and has not been widely accepted. Alex mentioned in an interview that even if the multisig committee has the authority, they can only pause assets, and the decision on assets is left to the DAO community.

But this explanation can only be heard, because once layer2 suffers a huge asset attack, such as a contract being arbitrarily increased by several trillion assets, it seems feasible to buy out layer2 assets and do DAO governance voting.

On the other hand, Alex has published an article discussing the use of a mechanism for hierarchical governance by the Supreme Court to manage layer2, but that proposal may ultimately trigger a hard fork of the mainnet. However, this is impossible as layer2 currently does not have the authority to decide whether or not to fork the mainnet, and this can only remain in the conceptual stage.

It is evident that Alex has been struggling with the contradiction between security and decentralization for a long time. If we remove the term "official cross-chain bridge", more assets will be distributed among various third-party cross-chain bridges, which will weaken the centralization issue in Rollup governance contract management authority accordingly.

This layout sounds reasonable, but it is only a temporary solution. After all, even third-party cross-chain bridges will have centralization risks as long as liquidity control reaches a certain scale. How does TxFusion build cross-chain bridges? We hope that the official can disclose technical details related to this. For example, if similar security crises occur in TxFusion's Portal and Bridge in the future, how will zkSync respond? This question cannot be answered now, so let's wait and see.

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