As expected, the age of ad-hoc bridges is coming to an end. Within Cosmos, we have IBC, but outside of it, we need to select bridge partner(s). Very much in line with Osmosis, I would urge us not to dilute the liquidity on our network, and focus on a single bridge partner.
Tangentially, over time, we should also create a mechanism to port any liquidity on the bridges that SCRT Labs developed, but that’s a topic for another time.
In the past few months, a few bridges have reached out to us, and this is a situation where I think it isn’t for SCRT Labs to decide what’s best for the network. In fact, I would look to someone (perhaps the infra committee?) to step up and lead this effort (take calls, compile data, and reach a decision within a few weeks).
Opening the discussion here so we can ideate on how to manage this, but the time to make a decision is now.
Love this Guy! I have been kind of poking around the question of bridges lately on a few twitter spaces and calls. I asked on the Hydro spaces the other day and was very curious. Especially with the lack of trust in bridges and number of hacks lately I think it’s a very crucial decisions to make.
Really love this convo. I think that it would be helpful here to gather a team of people from throughout the Cosmos to come up with an agreed set of solutions. From a user experience perspective having the same bridges as OSMO and TERRA will be a big benefit. It would be really great if we can help form an IBC wide view.
Agreed. I don’t think it’s TOTALLY necessary as voting could be different per community and use case, but obviously standard processes and procedures are nice. Osmosis team has voiced their support for Axelar I know, but ultimately the community decides. This COULD be influenced by what their financial interests are in each project which I think muddies the waters. For example, who got the biggest NOMIC, or Gravity Bridge or Evmos airdrops?
Is the purpose here to select a bridging partner for liquidity only, or one for private data? If the latter, there is no solution that I’m aware of that provides for fully private data between Eth/Solana/rollup/etc and Secret.
@Avret and I are planning to fill that gap (see the proposal that he put on this forum earlier this week).
@benjaminsimon97 and @Avret this discussion is about liquidity bridges like the current eth/bsc/xmr bridges, not contract call bridges. please keep this on topic
Thought it would be good to post the discussion from today’s Governance call here as well:
"If we choose a different provider than the other IBC networks it might hinder progress, perhaps we should make this decision in conjunction with other chains? Standardization is a huge plus and an important factor to consider. However, on some of these other networks it’s hard to tell what the underlying incentives for voting one way or another are. Especially in the cosmos ecosystem with large airdrops it gets a little convoluted when it skews voting. It sometimes seems more about what project do you hold huge bags of, and not what is the best technology. We should not go for the OSMO solution without considering the alternatives ourselves. Gravity bridge is a very inside group, and EVMOS has airdrop features as well. This is definitely an aspect we should take into consideration as well.
In short: Technical factors as well as standardization factors should be considered.
We could also go with the most volume and easiest user experience. Instead of a fractured UX, the most ideal solution is to have interoperability and confluence with as many chains as possible. Most volume on any bridge in the cosmos ecosystem is probably on Secret Network, we have the most ETH locked on a bridge. It is difficult to make a decision now when we don’t know what is going on with the other bridges. But we should prevent bad UX, i.e. we should stick to our choices and do migrations as infrequently as possible.
Should we make a wishlist with what we would like to see? For example: Trustless, non-multisig, built-in insurance? OSMO had a list of criteria, and had all the bridges submit proposals. We could do something similar, a RFP for Secret Network Bridging.
Would we be willing to support bridges that only go through SCRT, or only bridges that work on every IBC chain?
Thorchain could be a hub that is an entry and exit point for a lot of tokens. It will focus on L1 coins and not ERC20 tokens, do we care about that? Axelar and Thorchain seem to be the only big options?
Bonus points if we can bridge NFTs, we might sort of have one, but it’s not clear what the details are. "
I spoke with Gravity yesterday actually and need to set up a meeting with @guy. There were some interesting insights in the whole Osmo process (which seemed pre determined and influenced). Made me rethink things a bit
