Describes the current state Harmony’s bridge to all chains roadmap followed by a community-driven path to recovery
Bridges are a form of public good. According to Stanford’s Encylopedia of Philosophy:
“The government plays a significant role in providing goods such as national defence, infrastructure, education, security, and fire and environmental protection almost everywhere. These goods are often referred to as “public goods”.
In contemporary economics, goods are usually defined as public goods if and only if they are both non-rivalrous and non-excludable”
Blockchain Bridges Defined
Blockchain bridges are a mechanism to enable transfer of value between two or more blockchains that are running dissimilar techniques. Today, most bridges have a 1-to-1 relationship, and some are even uni-drectional. Examples of bridges could go from Ethereum-to-Polygon, Bitcoin-to-Polkadot, and so on.
Think of them as different forms of fiat currencies which need an intermediary to transfer value for commerce between one ecosystem to another. Ethereum Foundation wrote a comprehensive article on bridges worth reading to have a solid foundation of this topic and a primer to blockchain bridges here.
Are Bridges Necessary?
We believe in a multi-chain world in the future. We are aware of Vitalik’s sentiments on cross-chain bridges, which warns about the current attempts of cross-chain activities, especially economic activities, creating a honey pot within bridges incentivizing malicious actors to infiltrate them for a hefty reward. He has yet to offer any solution around how best a multi-chain world can co-exist as it is common in today’s practice to exchanges between fiat currencies to conduct international trades of real goods and services between sovereign entities.
This is merely a limitation of today’s world where macro-economies around the world lack the tools and comprehension of a multi-currency (multi-chain) world limiting our abilities to comprehend trade in a multi-chain world. Hence the common practice of first exchanging foreign currencies to a local currency (a cross-chain activity) unblocks the human comprehension to then be able to conduct local trades (within a chain).
The singular macro-economy comprehension of human beings today is the reason driving the push continuous improvements in cross-chain functionalities, and bridges are necessary vehicle helping the world leverage the benefits of a multi-chain blockchain ecosystem.
… bridges are necessary vehicle helping the world leverage the benefits of a multi-chain blockchain ecosystem
Bridges for The People
The Harmony Foundation have a consistent mission mind to build bridges as a public good — to help build a “bridge across all (block)chains”. The Horizon Bridge launched in Nov 2020 was a start to this mission. The next step was to build out an Ethereum Trustless Bridge from the open-sourced Horizon bridge codebase, to incentivize independent service providers to run an infrastructure which partakes in a public goods experiment unlike any other.
Harmony then went on to build and launched the world’s first Bitcoin Trustless Bridge, with a soft launch in late Q4 2021 which picked up steadily in Q1 2022; at one point accumulating over 200 BTC in locked in the bridges for liquidity. Messari reported on March 28, 2022 of Harmony’s use of the XCLAIM design framework to implement this for the first time in a production network.
Both bridges matches the non-rivalrous (trustless) and non-excludable (permissionless) definition of a “public good”.
Unfortunately, the Horizon bridge suffered a hack which thwarted this public goods initiative. The “bridge across all chain” mission has now become a difficult narrative for Harmony.
Bridges of Trust
Since the Horizon bridge incident, Harmony wishes to continue its mission. However, the bridges of trust can be defined as the 3-elements of trust — positive relationship, good judgment/expertise and consistency — had to be addressed.
Positive relationship requires a continuous management such as from Harmony ONE Weekly rolled out and paused recently; a post-mortem of the incident with a detailed report detailing the lessons learned and next steps; and a community driven initiative called Recovery ONE to hopefully begin moving this gauge in the right direction.
Good judgment/expertise is upon the leadership team with Stephen Tse (CEO) and Li Jiang (COO) facing a daily barrage over social media to decide what the next steps could look like. The surrounding core team, fellows, contributors and moderators are working through the negative sentiment as best as they could. Fundamental and radical changes could be necessary to help rebuild trust as recently as utilizing a rare resource called “the community” which many other chains are striving for.
Consistency is what we’re striving for today, with the continuation of contributions into the Trustless Ethereum Bridge codebase. We’re focused on delivering platform-driven products with bridges to multiple chains. For example, with Cosmos and the Tendermint (Ignite) ecosystem, option is to partner with existing bridge builders to connect into the Harmony ecosystem. Once such partnership is with Datachain to connect to the Cosmos ecosystem which helps rebuild the bridging strategy surrounding Harmony.
Restoring Bridges
While there’s a community driven Recovery ONE committee attempting to restore the unbacked assets from the bridge hack on the Harmony chain, Harmony needs to also rebuild a new set of bridges across other chains. This is an infrastructure-level work. The restoration of the unbacked assets will take a while, as did Axie’s Ronin bridge hack which took several months plus a fund raise led by Binance to help with the recovery.
Harmony will rely on external partners such as, with the above-mentioned Datachain partnership, to implement the infrastructure to build bridges into the Cosmos ecosystem via the InterBlockchain Connector (IBC).
Stably has also completed integrations of a KYC-based bridge with Harmony, starting with being a fully 1-to-1 fiat-backed USD fiat on-ramp natively minted on Harmony called USDS. This will be fast followed by wrapped BTC (BTCS) and wrapped ETH (ETHS) with full custody in an institutional grade vault at Prime Trust.
There’s another partnership soon to be announced with a Tier-1 Venture Capitalist invested team that is aimed to fully restore Harmony’s DeFi ecosystem with a new set of decentralized bridge.
Crossing the New Bridge
As for the roadmap of how the bridges to Harmony will look like, we’ll “cross the bridge when we get there” when the bridge partner integrations are fully deployed and when the unbacked assets are being recovered by the Recovery ONE initiative.
To keep up to date with the current events, follow the Harmony and RecoveryONE Twitter handles, and read the threads on the Harmony Talk forum.
Harmony: @harmonyprotocol
RecoveryONE: @recoveryfdn
Talk Forum: https://recoveryone.community
