Attacks on bridge technology in 2022 led to the theft of $2.5 billion from decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, according to a report by Token Terminal. While this could have been a setback for many projects and, thus, for the crypto space, it seems to be fueling infrastructure and security developments.
At the ETH Denver 2023, Web3 protocol Koii Labs and software company Idexo announced a new middleware bridge to advance deployments on-chain with "just a few lines of code," Cointelegraph exclusively learned from the teams. The solution aims not only to improve security and speed up deployments, but also to create a path to replace centralized crypto exchanges with DeFi bridges.
Through bridges, two or more blockchains can share data, such as smart contracts or tokens. Bridges connect different architecture and database networks, but security has been a continuing challenge for projects.
"The core risk associated with bridges is that they require signing wallets to put through transactions on the destination chain. If those wallets were compromised, then they could make arbitrary transactions that don’t correspond to an event on the originating blockchain," explained CEO of Idexo Greg Marlin about last year's security incidents targeting bridges.
The new middleware bridge, however, forces randomization of the signers (decentralized nodes), with a large number of signers available compared to a threshold number of signers for a destination transaction. The bridge's staking and reward mechanism ensures that the size of transactions is limited by the stake of the eligible participating nodes, claimed Marlin, adding that:
Related: Uniswap DAO debate shows devs still struggle to secure cross-chain bridges
Another pain
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