Ethereum IBC by Omar Zaki

Transcript

hello everybody I'm uh brain jar I'm the founder of uh picoso Network we've been focused for the past 3 years on introducing um and expanding the IBC protocol which is a transport protocol that has been designed for the cosmos ecosystem to new ecosystems Beyond um tenorman consensus so we've originally been focused on bringing IBC to the do Sama ecosystem and you know more recently uh we've actually launched ethereum IBC and also salana IBC um why does this actually matter mostly because of the fact that all of the other existing

bridging protocols out there are centralized and don't rely on light client verification because of that we've actually taken the time and the energy to build these bridging protocols out that can last for you know centuries and are fully permissionless fully decentralized and you only trust the chain so you know everyone knows what the problem in defi is you know it's fragmentation there is a variety of different protocols out there layer zero Axel Wormhole um all different types of bridges that are being used currently to move assets between different ecosystems um also generalize message

passing the problem with a lot of these protocols is if they haven't been hacked already um you know the reason why these Protocols are hackable is because there is this massive centralization Vector that they introduce when building out these bridging protocols as an example you know Axel has a set of validators um these validators essentially act the same way that you know very similar to the way Wormhole Guardians act in that they receive you know a state transition from one chain and basically turn around to the other chain and say trust me bro um this is all good feel free to proceed with the bridging

um we looked at this and we said okay you know 10 you know 10 years from now do we really want to rely on somebody in the middle of this protocol in the middle of these different uh chains to tell us you know it's okay to bridge um so we were looking for a protocol that could really be decentralized and could really allow us to provide these you know three key features um trust minimization censorship resist resistance and permissionless um you know having a bridging protocol that allows you to you know not have your funds Frozen by a guardian not have to wait 30 minutes for

someone to say trust me bro and and then the third component is you know not even having the trust me bro component is is really valuable as well so just you know concretely what does this actually mean basically we take um you know consensus proofs and Blockhead headers from different chains and send them to each other for validation by light clients on every chain so to to architect a protocol like this we decided we need like we needed a dedicated chain to be able to serve as this kind of Hub chain for all these different interactions so Cosmos is you know 50 plus um different chains they're

al already speaking this protocol um and so we decided you know we want to be part of the cosmos ecosystem in that we want to make a layer one dedicated for this purpose um and can we then use this chain to expand to expand these you know the existing Cosmos ecosystems but also to expand you know connectivity between ethereum and salana and and other ecosystems over IBC so what this actually looks like is you know we have our own L1 it's called Picasso and we connect to Cosmos ethereum polka dot salana and many more

chains in the future specifically over IBC so to make a chain IBC enabled is not just like layer zero or Axel R where they just like deploy a contract we actually have to build the light clients necessary to be able to have the communication between the chains um so this has taken us 3 years to build basically the ability to bridge assets between any of these ecosystems um is quite a lot of effort to to put in to be able to make this work but once it's done it's done forever basically um so the other component that we're

excited about because of IBC is also reing so a lot of people have been meing Picasso as you know the the first Solana reaking layer um the reality is is we're actually hoping to do generalized reaking so you know if you have a bridging protocol that actually works and can securely pass messages from one ecosystem to another that's been the main issue for reaking right like igen layer exists on ethereum you know uh Babylon is also doing you know Bitcoin reaking but none of these different

ecosystems have a secure way of speaking with each other and because of that there's no way to introduce generalized reaking so for us we we looked at this problem and we said the only real reason why generalized reaking doesn't exist is because there is no bridging protocol and so you know we're rolling out generalized reaking we already have salana reaking we'll be introducing Tia reaking you know eth assets as well but the beauty of this is that all these different vaults can speak to each other over IBC so just a little bit more about why this is so hard and what the architecture actually looks

like basically on ethereum we have a like client of tender to receive blocks from the cosmos ecosystem we need to be able to snark ed25519 signatures and also receive the consensus proofs from Cosmos and be able to understand them on ethereum and then on the ethereum side we also need to be able to understand you know the consensus of ethereum the recent State Transitions and all the necessary proofs required to be able to move funds back and forth so this is basically what the architecture looks like we've been working with succinct to introduce the

ZK circuit necessary for snarking of the signatures um and yeah basically like from there Picasso connects to you know salana Cosmos all the other ecosystems that we connect to over IBC so who actually cares about this stuff well basically everybody should care about IBC because in 5 years from now do you really want you know if layer zero Bridges you to base and then they decide to shut you off because of whatever reason they could do that you can't do that with IBC so we've been working with a variety of different people to to actually like roll out use cases of ethereum IBC

primarily on the defi side but we've also been looking you know working with different rollups as a service um different D5 protocols and different ecosystems as well um so more on this another time so where where actually are we with ethereum IBC um so we've launched this two weeks ago so it's like you know there's been a lot of different team teams like polymer and you know a variety of different teams out there working on ethereum IBC we are the first to launch it um we already have transfers live between ethereum and Cosmos we announced that we're

introducing a frax pool on osmosis and also a USD USD pair on curve So currently I would say we're in phase one where sort of everything is is you know kind of beta um and we're moving very soon to to phase 2 where basically you know there will be this salana integration as well which salana is coming out this week it already is live we have't announce it to the public yet our hope is that people will then if you have salana IBC and ethereum IBC like that's a real competitor to Wormhole um so the hope is faith 2 becomes turbocharged with the

fact that we have salana integration as well salana IBC is faster and cheaper than Wormhole it takes 30 seconds to go from Cosmos to salana so hoping that you know the path to ethereum and back is cheaper than competition um because you know it's obviously nice to be trust minimized censorship resistant permissionless but we also need to make sure we're faster and cheaper so Phase 2 is becoming more engaged this week and you know will continue over the next few months as well so now that we have ethereum IBC

Solon IBC generalized reaking you know what are we actually doing with all this stuff um basically my vision for crypto has always been can we build a simple application that lets me do anything on any chain I've been you know trying to roll this out for multiple years the reason why we haven't is because the first issue is bridging there's no good Bridges out there so we have to build Bridges ourselves now that the bridges are done we'll introduce these these Frameworks for like swaps lending cross chain all these different cool cross chain functionalities through an application called

mantis um and as as far as further Bridges um different teams this week have been speaking to us about you know having IBC live on day one um you know I think we're interested in next doing Bitcoin um recent developments with things like bit VM and um other VMS on bitcoin I think will enable Bitcoin IBC but still yet to be determined and yeah I think that's it thank you guys um

questions have some hello hello when will when will the the main net go live so e IBC is already live right now it's already live okay mhm so if you go to mans. apppp and you you hit SL ethereum you can already Bridge assets from ethereum to Cosmos hey yeah um can you go into a bit more um uh into a bit more detail um regarding the economic security that um

you guys are leveraging with your reaking so it seems like you're taking Cosmos um validators and staking and then reaking that on these um other chains for the most part and then sort of these receipts that you're passing around are kind of like proof they're almost like liquid restating or restating tokens um but yeah can you kind of explain how that interoperability is work works yeah yeah so like interoperability and reaking are like two so interoperability works completely without reaking so like all the all the bridging all the proofs all the leline verification that's happening on different chains that's all happening without reaking but when you have a secure system that actually doesn't rely

on you know some Guardian in the middle and so then what's the trust model the trust model is you're trusting the chains right so we're trusting ethereum we're trusting Cosmos we're trusting salana if any one of these chains reorgs the bridge dies basically um but I think that's a better trust assumption than axar getting hacked basically um so because of this we then said can we build a vault on ethereum can we build a vault on salana can we build a vault on you know our own chain to take in like Cosmos assets Etc

ethereum assets salana assets and then build an AVS layer where slashing can happen orchestrated by this trust minimized bridging protocol and the answer is yes right like there are other people trying to do generalized reaking like uh KAC and exocore and other asset agnostic bridging uh sorry reaking protocols but the the real true truth of the matter is you can't do that without interop right so I wouldn't be surprised for instance if one of these generalized reaking protocols was powered by like layer zero or whatever but the problem is is now you have billions of dollars in

TBL on different chains secured by layer Zero versus secured by the chain right so if I fill up a vault with eth in ethereum I'm trusting eth and it's the same exact trust assumptions as I'm trusting ethereum to bridge from ethereum to Cosmos so because of these similar trust assumptions that's why we're doing the reaking layer on top of the IBC um infrastructure yeah wish Cham yeah so we actually run

our own Cosmos chain called Picasso um it's p sorry yeah it's it's powered by the Pika token um it connects to osmosis Cosmos Hub stargaze all the major chains in in Cosmos and so assets flow from ethereum to our Cosmos chain and then from our Cosmos chain to everywhere else basically correct yeah yeah validat pool exactly so if if Picasso goes so if Picasso reorgs um the

bridge will halt right funds will not be lost though right it's it's different than AEL and that if Axel gets 51% attacked that all your funds can be stolen in our model because it's based on Lifeline verification if there if the chain gets 51% attacked um the verification will just fail and funds will not be able to move so Economic Security is important but it's not as important as a centralized system that does require Economic Security however um I did mention uh ethos so so ethos is a cosmos chain that

is securing other Cosmos chains using igen layer um so we will become one of their chains that they get past us igen layer security so ideally in a perfect world you know we have like 1 billion plus of of Economic Security