Community Trust ScoreVerified
One of the most bullish things about THORChain is the constant refusal to do superficial things that would artificially pump the price but weaken the product long term.
Charles, iearn finance: If you look at Thorchain’s whitepaper, they state “nodes should stay anonymous, never trying to coordinate, communicate or socially signal,” but don’t elaborate on how this can be enforced. Stating that they ‘should,’ without any mechanism to enforce, is weak security.
Given that a PoS algorithm that slashes bad actors usually only requires 51-66% of the stake, a group of colluders could have as much as 3x to gain from rugging!
Still, it’s not amazing. Nodes are likely to know each other, and the incentive to collude is high. Synapse, for example, has about ~$900M in TVL and its native token SYN has a $600M market cap.
Usually, these projects use a threshold signature scheme such that transactions ‘from the bridge’ need something like 2/3rds approval from all of the nodes. This is more secure, since it reduces the risk of a single-point of failure.
More secure are projects like Thorchain, Wormhole, Chainlink CCIP, and Synapse. Instead of a single party responsible for moving assets/messages, power is split among a consortium of nodes, called ‘validators’ in Synapse and ‘guardians’ in Wormhole.
This allows for great functionality, but the glaring problem is the security model, which is essentially ‘trust me bro.’
When people talk about ‘blockchain interoperability,’ they usually are talking about one of two things: a bridge or an interoperability blockchain.
Interoperability blockchains, like Polkadot and Cosmos, define a ‘relay’ or ‘hub’ chain that is responsible for sending messages between connected chains. This allows for use-cases such as ‘program on chain A controls an asset on chain B.’
Interoperability blockchains, especially Polkadot, are also highly secure. So, what’s the catch?
These blockchains are optimized for connecting chains that deploy on them natively, such as Moonbeam and Acala on Polkadot and Osmosis and Evmos on Cosmos, not existing chains like Ethereum and Solana.
For Ethereum to become a Polkadot parachain, for example, node implementations would need to be rewritten to pass along special messages to the Polkadot relay chain, not gonna happen.
But we still might want communication between independent blockchains, like Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, and NEAR. This would allow for things like cross-chain swaps (e.g., SOL<>ETH pair), central governance for multi-chain apps (vote on one chain, have actions taken on all) and offshoring expensive operations to cheaper chains are some of many. And if we want this, we need bridges.
The OG bridges are CEXes. BitGo allows BTC to exist on Ethereum. Coinbase allows you to easily swap SOL<>ETH. They could also, if they wanted, tell everyone “send your messages to this Ethereum smart contract, and we’ll pass them along to Solana”
