The Next Evolution of Crypto Bridges. The Future Is Now.

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gadrian5.5 K2 months ago3 min read

In yesterday's post we talked, among other things, about crypto bridges. As far as I am aware, most if not all crypto bridges use wrapped tokens, custodial bridges, or centralized intermediaries. And all of them are points of failure or of choking the free transfer of funds.

The Bitcoin-HIVE bridge that is being built by VSC may be a little different because bridge nodes will need to be over-collateralized for the swaps they'll perform, and if something goes wrong, they'll lose the collateral. Or at least that's what I understood.

https://i.imgur.com/o2ItDUX.jpeg
Source

However, someone seems to have resolved all the vulnerability points of existing bridges. At least that's how it looks at a quick read, because unfortunately, that's all I have time for these days... quick everything.

As I was going through my crypto holdings for my monthly overview, I noticed a link on ThorSwap to a piece of news. I don't often follow these links when I am focused on a task, but this time I did, and I don't regret it. It was a link to a Medium article entitled "Cross-Chain Made Easy: THORSwap Integrates Chainflip Liquidity Network". I didn't have time to read it then, but I saved it for later, and I read through it when I finished.

Here's a paragraph that is very interesting to our crypto bridges discussion:

Chainflip brings to the table an innovative approach to cross-chain liquidity that eliminates the need for wrapped tokens, custodial bridges, or centralized intermediaries. This ground-breaking technology allows for direct swaps between different blockchain assets, preserving the ethos of decentralization and security inherent to DeFi.

Now, we could say this is marketing and we've seen well-written whitepapers before and nothing in reality to back them up. But the ThorSwap team decided to integrate ChainFlip and make it "the first new cross-chain protocol supported on THORSwap since inception". It also allows, indirectly, the addition of another L1 blockchain, Polkadot, to ThorSwap.

The article linked above describes with enough detail how ChainFlip technology works, so if you are interested, give it a read, this part isn't long.

In my opinion, it was inevitable that the existing bridges needed an alternative solution that was more aligned with the decentralization principles and values.

I liked this key takeaway for ChainFlip:

Support for non-EVM chains: native support for Bitcoin, Ethereum and Polkadot (new!) with more application specific chains to come.

The parts I like are:

support for non-EVM chains
more application-specific chains to come; Hive can be thought of as application-specific, right? Of course, this is wishful thinking...

What do you think about their tech? Is it the future we want and need for crypto bridges, or it has major drawbacks too?