Aave V3 on Ethereum | LI.FI 3rd Audit ✅ | Interchain Gas Payments on Hyperlane | anyCall v7 Launched & More!

Last Week In The Multi-Chain Ecosystem (23-29 Jan '23)

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Jan 30, 2023

Welcome to LI.FI’s Cross Chain Insider newsletter. If you want to join this community of cross-chain aficionados learning about bridges, interoperability, and the multi-chain ecosystem, subscribe below:

You can also check out LI.FI’s research articles, and follow us on Twitter!

Bridge Updates

1) LI.FI Completes Third Audit 👏

With the Spearbit audit completed, LI.FI smart contracts have now been audited three times (by Spearbit, Code4rena, and Quantstamp). Read more here.

2) Interchain Gas Payments Live on Hyperlane 🧐

Hyperlane has deployed new interchain gas payment (IGP) contract addresses, which will be enforced on dApps building on top of Hyperlane using on-chain fee quoting. The migration process toward enforcing accurate interchain gas payments has begun; dApps can learn more about the changes here.

3) anyCall v7 Officially Launched 🔥

anyCall v7, an arbitrary messaging protocol by Multichain, is now live on 7 chains, including Ethereum, Optimism, BNBChain, Polygon, Fantom, Arbitrum, and Avalanche. Learn more about anyCall here.

4) FBI: Lazarus Group Responsible for Harmony's Horizon Bridge Hack 🤔

The FBI has confirmed that the “Lazarus Group (also known as APT38), cyber actors associated with the DPRK, are responsible for the theft of $100 million of virtual currency from Harmony’s Horizon bridge reported on June 24, 2022.”

Harmony bridge was hacked for $100M on June 24, 2022, heavily impacting Harmony’s DeFi ecosystem.

5) Across UI Update 🤌🏻

Across’ UI has been updated with a new look to the bridge, pool, and reward pages, along with added position size and APY details to help users better manage their pool positions and rewards. Check it out here.

Multi-Chain Ecosystem Updates

1) Aave V3 on Ethereum 🔥

Aave V3 went live on Ethereum on January 27th since the AIP for the same passed with 100% votes (706,258 AAVE) in favor of the launch. Aave V3 unlocks new technical features and benefits, including:

High-Efficiency Mode: allowing increased capital efficiency.
Isolation Mode: enabling liquidity risk to be siloed.
Gas Optimization: reduces gas costs by ~ 20-25%.

For more details on the V3 ETH deployment and how to migrate your assets from V2 to V3, read more.

2) Contract Secured Revenue Enabled on Canto 🧐

Contract Secured Revenue, or CSR, a fee split model implemented by Canto which enables dApps o claim a percentage of any transaction fees paid to the network when users interact with their smart contracts, has been enabled. Read more about CSR contract registration, assignment, and fee withdrawal here.

3) Scroll's Performance Boost Through Batching 💪🏻

Scroll, the native zkEVM, has completed a testate upgrade that includes a performance boost through a new batching system that aggregates blocks into batches instead of proving blocks individually. Learn more about how this works here.

4) Axelar Brings Cross-Chain Swaps to Fantom 👏

Axelar and Squid, a cross-chain any-2-any swap platform built on Axelar, are bringing one-click cross-chain swaps to one of Fantom’s leading DEXs, SpookySwap.

5) Celo 2.0 Technical Roadmap 2023 🤔

Celo, in collaboration with cLabs, has shared the new Celo 2.0 Technical Roadmap for 2023. The vision for Celo’s next chapter is to become the “best platform on which to launch and scale any Web3 project that furthers the regenerative economy.” Learn more about how the team plans on achieving its goals here.

What’s Popping on Twitter?

Recently, SuperteamDAO hosted a friendly debate between Anatoly Yakovenko (co-founder of Solana and CEO of Solana Labs) and Toghrul Maharramov (Researcher at Scroll) moderated by Connor aka c-node (Researcher, Switchboard) on their Youtube channel. The topic of the debate? Solana vs Ethereum, from the context decentralization, economic security, trustless bridges, L3, and more.

Superteam @SuperteamDAO

The long awaited friendly debate between @aeyakovenko & @toghrulmaharram on decentralization, economic security, trustless bridges, L3, & more. Moderated by @colludingnode.. Watch now!

youtu.beSolana vs Ethereum Debate ft. Anatoly & ToghrulA spirited debate between Anatoly Yakovenko (co-founder of Solana and CEO of Solana Labs) and Toghrul Maharramov (Researcher, Scroll), moderated by C-node (...

For those who haven’t checked out the discussion yet, here are some notes:

Q1. Make a good faith elevator pitch for each others project.

Anatoly: Zero knowledge proofs are magic. Can't wait to see it work in practical apps.

Toghrul: Parallel execution is vital for scaling blockchains and Solana achieves it. Solana maximizes execution; enabling interaction with blockchains and the lowest possible latency.

Q2. What is the purpose of the technology we’re building? Why should engineers and researchers work on improving public blockchains?

Toghrul: Building applications that are censorship resistant is the reason why I’m in the space and also what excites me the most about this technology. Example: important for countries that are not the most democratic and also key for avoiding what happened with Tornado Cash.

Anatoly: Self-custody and the ability for humans to use cryptography. The idea that individuals have access to consumer grade cryptography is powerful. Getting humans to co-ordinate with cryptography is fascinating.

Q3. How big should a full node be?

Anatoly: As small as possible for the task that it’s doing which is delivering value to the world. The node’s capacity should grow based on the demand.

Toghrul: The hardware requirements should be as low as possible. As many people as possible should have the ability to validate the chain fully.

Q4. Should every smartphone be able to verify all transactions?

Anatoly: There’s no way to escape the need for one honest node to have the whole state of the network. That one honest node cannot ever be on a smartphone realistically.

Toghrul: No; it’s not viable for users to run full nodes on their phones because the throughput requirements are too high.

Q5. What is economic security?

Anatoly: There’s no such thing as economic security (it’s a false belief). There’s only valid state transitions accepted by full nodes.

Toghrul: Economic security is relevant for censorship resistant, liveness, running light clients. For the validity of the state transitions, economic security is irrelevant.

Conclusion: Economic security is the the cost to create a problem that requires social consensus to recover from. And the economic security becomes high by product market fit.

Q6. Why are bridges inherently not trustless?

Anatoly: Every month somebody posts ‘we have a trustless bridge’. But bridges are inherently not trustless.

Toghrul: There’s no way to interact with a blockchain without having any trust assumptions. A trustless interaction with a chain would be running a full node; anything added on top (even running light clients) is not trustless. There’s always some trust involved (even Rollups are not trustless; they’re trust-minimized)

Q7. Views on Validiums; their security properties and use cases.

Anatoly: Validiums publish only the state root to the L1 and everything else is maintained off-chain.

Toghrul: It’s a perfectly fine solution but I won’t use it for applications that have billions of dollars in them. However, there are use-cases where you don’t need the full security (Example: gaming applications) where Validiums are useful.

Q8. Do we need an L3?

Anatoly: The question comes down to what kind of system we need to design based on the throughput required.

Toghrul: L3s are inevitable, not because of the throughputs but more for application specific things.

The above dialogue is just a synopsis of the debate. The participants went into great detail about each topic of discussion and shared helpful insights that everyone should check out to enhance their knowledge about the space.

The debate also discussed other trending topics in 2023, like app-chains, 1/n honest assumption for networks, the difference between full nodes and consensus nodes, zk rollups, etc.

Shoutout to the SuperteamDAO for organizing this debate!