What should we consider after Ronin bridge has been exploited?
Recently, the Ronin bridge has been exploited for 173,600 Ethereum and 25.5M USDC. The Robin bridge and Katana Dex have been halted.
In addition to worrying about whether the funds can be returned, most people may be more concerned about what it means for the cross-chain bridge to have another serious accident? What we can see so far is at least the following:
Ethereum’s “Security First” Is Right
As we all know, the solution and upgrade of Ethereum expansion was criticized for being too long due to its pursuit of “extreme security”. So much so that it was snatched away by many competing “high-speed” chains.
In fact, the reason why Ethereum is slow to solve the expansion problem is because the Ethereum community follows the “safety first” principle, and never compromises on security. Every important upgrade of a permanent divergence requires repeated long-term tests before it can be officially launched.
In fact, Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, questioned and criticized the potential security problems of the cross-chain bridge more than once. The last time Buterin expressed his concerns about the security of the cross-chain bridge solution was in January this year. He mentioned that in a single chain, you can easily restore the chain, and everyone can restore the assets to the initial state. However, in the case of multiple chains, if there is a problem with the asset, the recovery of the chain will be a big problem. Earlier, Buterin tweeted a link to Reddit post in which he discussed his belief in a multi-chain future, but expressed doubts about the cross-chain ecosystem. Vitalik Buterin believes that there are fundamental security limitations across chain bridges.
Ethereum Layer 2 is more competitive than “high-speed” chains
It has always been a consensus that Ethereum is the most secure chain of all smart contract public chains. Many “high-speed chains” are released for the purpose of solving the “high fee but low speed” problem of Ethereum, but most of the “high-speed chains” have more or less compromised on security in order to improve performance.
In October last year, after the Ethereum road map was updated to center on Rollup construction, several Rollup Layer 2 solutions have attracted much attention. Up to now, the total TVL of Ethereum’s main Layer 2 network has exceeded 7 billion US dollars. In most cases, Layer 2 directly inherits the security of the Ethereum main network.
So far, with the exception of slightly slower progress of several Layer2 schemes, some Layer2 schemes that are progressing faster have achieved good performance. The high-speed chain should already be feeling the pressure. Many people have mentioned earlier that in the future, Ethereum Layer 2 will directly compete with high-speed chains.
It explains why most NFTs prefer Ethereum chain
For a long time, some people have been puzzled that Ethereum is slow and the handling fee is expensive. Why do mainstream NFTs have to be released on Ethereum? Now the answer comes, that is, Ethereum is more secure, and at the same time, the ecosystem is larger, with the largest number of developers and users. This is the reason why many teams have released GameFi on the high-speed chain before, and they always have to cross the chain to Ethereum. I remember a project party once said: “Many users with large funds are only trust Ethereum, and only buy NFTs on Ethereum.”
