Snowbridge is currently live on Polkadot and is undergoing final testing, with two of its lead developers predicting it will have a public launch this upcoming week.
It will usher in a new era of a trustless, decentralized bridge between Polkadot and Ethereum, with features such as light client verification and cryptographic security.
Snowbridge is launching this week, two leading developers in the Polkadot ecosystem have revealed.
Traditional bridges trust third-party signatures for moving assets, compromising security.
Snowbridge is trustless, relying on first-party Polkadot & Ethereum validators.
Everything you need to know about the upcoming Polkadot <> Ethereum bridge w/ @musnit & @itsbirdo_ pic.twitter.com/iDRo6Xe6qd
— Polkadot (@Polkadot) June 12, 2024
Snowbridge is an initiative that was brought forward by the Snowfork team, which partnered with Parity Technologies on its development. Currently, any Ethereum asset that exists on the Polkadot network is transferred via third-party bridges, leaving them in the hands of signatures from private keys that don’t match Polkadot’s validator set. This setup risks the security of Polkadot, and its parachains, with the assets not protected by the full security features of the Polkadot Relay Chain.
Snowbridge solves this, offering a trustless model whose security structure relies on signatures from first-party Polkadot validators. It runs on the secure BridgeHub, which also anchors the bridge between Polkadot and Kusama.
On Thursday, Snowfork developer Aidan Musnitzky and Polkadot ecosystem lead Birdo revealed in an X space that the bridge is now live on the mainnet and will be available to the public in the coming week.
One of the critical benefits that Aidan highlighted is that, unlike existing bridging infrastructure, SnowBridge will be open to all kinds of messaging, facilitating its movement from Ethereum to Polkadot securely. He stated:
One of the characteristics of our bridge is that it is agnostic to assets. Under the hood, our messaging protocol supports any kind of message, allowing arbitrary data to be sent between Polkadot and Ethereum.
He explained that this means a user can send a transaction message from Polkadot via SnowBridge to Ethereum, where it would be converted into an executable smart contract, and vice versa.
Other major features the two highlighted included a light client verification under which transactions and block headers are quickly verified from the source blockchain. With cybercriminals targeting bridges en masse, Snowbridge’s cryptographic security ensures only valid transactions are bridged, while its synchronization feature ensures that light clients on both Polkadot and Ethereum remain in sync for secure cross-chain validation.
As with any other upgrade, governance is a key issue. With Snowbridge, governance will entirely be down to Polkadot’s OpenGov. As Snowfork CTOVincent Geddes explains: “governance messages flow from the Relay Chain to the BridgeHub, to the bridge itself and to the Gateway (which is the Ethereum side of the bridge).”
Snowbrdige is one of the key upgrades on Polkadot that seek to make the network one of the mainstays in the smart contract space. Others include the BEEFY (Bridge Efficiency Enabling Finality Yielder) protocol and Hyperbridge, as Crypto News Flash previously reported.
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