Synapse Chain | Cosmos<>Polkadot Bridge | Arbitrum Bridge Redesign | Bridge and Interop Resources & More!

Last Week In The Multi-Chain Ecosystem (25th to 31tst July 2022)

Arjun Chand

Aug 1, 2022

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Bridge Updates

1) Cosmos <> Polkadot Bridge is Now Live ⚡

Moonbeam, a Polkadot parachain, has partnered with Osmosis, a Cosmos-based DEX, to enable one-click swaps between the two chains via Axelar. This partnership makes it possible to swap assets between Polkadot and Cosmos ecosystem.

2) Synapse Chain Announced 🔥

Synapse Protocol has announced Synapse Chain, a novel smart contract execution layer built atop Synapse’s generic cross-chain messaging system and value bridge. Synapse Chain uses an optimistic verification design to verify cross-chain messages, switching from a multi-sig design.

3) Arbitrum Bridge Redesign 🖌️

Arbitrum’s bridge UI has been completely redesigned with a space theme. Post bridging, users are shown the approx. waiting time and dApps they can explore on Arbitrum. Instant withdrawals from Arbitrum one are available via Arbitrum’s native bridge and third-party bridges like Hop, Connext, Across, and cBridge.

4) Nomad Announces New Cohort of Investors 💸

Nomad announced their seed funding led by Polychain Capital in April. They revealed other big names from their list of strategic investors, including Coinbase Ventures, Crypto.com, Polygon, OpenSea, Wintermute, Gnosis, and Algae Ventures.

5) Rubic Integrates LI.FI’s SDK 💚

Rubic, a cross-chain swap aggregation protocol, has strategically integrated LI.FI’s SDK into its dApp. Rubic’s users can now bridge assets across 7 newly added chains using 6 additional DEXs and 9 bridges supported by LI.FI.

Multi-Chain Ecosystem Updates

1) We’re Getting Close to Arbitrum Nitro ⏳

Arbitrum has announced the scheduled dates of its plans for testnet upgrades before the release of Nitro. The team plans to upgrade mainnet to Nitro ‘within a couple of weeks after a successful testnet migration.’

2) Optimism Announces Drippie 👏🏻

OP Labs has released Drippie, a trust-minimized Ethereum-native conditional transaction system. Drippie works similarly to IFTTT (if this, then that) transaction automation systems that allow transactions to be executed under certain conditions — it allows devs to easily program (in Solidity) sets of checks/actions

3) Aurora Launches VOTE 🚀

Aurora Labs has launched VOTE, a decentralized governance platform to empower the community to govern the protocol themselves. Users can now stake AURORA to earn VOTE.

4) Fantom’s Ecosystem Support Vault Proposal has Passed ✅

The proposal to fund Fantom’s new vault for supporting ecosystem projects by diverting a third of the burn fees has passed. This empowers Fantom’s community of validators and stakers as they will control these diverted funds via on-chain governance and proposals.

5) Sushi Launches on Metis 🍣

Sushi has deployed Trident AMM and Bentobox farming on Metis. Users can now swap and bridge assets to farm rewards on Metis.

What’s Popping on Twitter?

After over a month of brainstorming and discussions with key stakeholders, the Harmony team proposed a reimbursement proposal for the Horizon bridge hack, resulting in the loss of $100M in user assets. The Harmony community has not received the plan well, as many members voiced their concerns with the strategy.

Harmony 💙 @harmonyprotocol

The reimbursement proposal is posted and available for feedback. We encourage the #HarmonyONE community to read and engage in conversation with each other and the core team. Thank you for your patience as we work to move forward together as ONE. Link:

talk.harmony.oneReimbursement Proposal [Horizon Incident]Introduction The Horizon bridge incident resulted in the loss of $99,340,030.00 worth of digital assets across approximately 65,000 wallets and 14 different asset types (details in the table below). The Harmony team feels it is important for the overall strength of the ecosystem that harms to impact…

A quick summary of the $100M Horizon Bridge hack:

Harmony’s Horizon Bridge was subject to a hack on June 24.
Horizon has an approval process that uses multi-sigs with five validators.
Only 2 out of 5 signatures are needed to validate transactions.
The attacker accessed two private keys and created a transaction extracting $100M from Horizon.
Harmony team offered a $1M bounty, which was later increased to $10M, to the hackers for returning the assets with anonymity.
The attackers did not accept the bounty and laundered the stolen funds via Tornado Cash.
Horizon’s multi-sig scheme has been updated to a 4/5 validation scheme post the incident.

Since the incident, the Harmony team has constantly reaffirmed to the community that they are doing everything possible to catch the hackers. Moreover, the team has been busy brainstorming ways to reimburse the affected users, and the proposal is finally out for everyone to discuss.

Here is a TL;DR of the key points in the proposal:

The proposal gives the community two options to choose from. Both options seek to reimburse users in ONE token over three years — 50% or 100% reimbursement in ONE token over 3 years (distributed monthly)
Inflation as a source of reimbursement funds — Hard fork of Harmony to increase ONE supply
Minting 86M ONE to resolve de-pegged loans due to uncollectible loans across dApps in the Harmony ecosystem
Repegging of assets is not a feasible strategy due to market and treasury conditions — The team will provide more information on this soon.

The snapshot vote for the proposal was supposed to begin today (on August 1). However, the community’s response to the proposal has not been positive, with many arguing that inflating ONE supply can be catastrophic for the Harmony ecosystem. As a result, the team has decided to go back to the drawing board and work on a revised proposal based on the feedback and suggestions from the community.