Tezos as Decentralized, Upgradable universal Bridge

As more and more chains are coming, so does more bridges. Most of them are secured by multi-sign wallet and being hacked. Bridges will become top usage part in crypto.

So wanted to check it it is a good idea to build fully decentralized universal bridge into tezos core protocol, which works without need of multi-sign wallets.

Why

  • Tezos have 700+ validators which can become most secure, upgradable, programmable bridge ever.

  • Moving assets between 100+ chains via strong programable bridge will bring millions of web3 users and billions worth of assets to tezos ecosystem.

  • This will enable second order opportunities to tezos, like Universal DEX, Oracle, Multichain smart contract execution, Multichain MEV etc.

I’m not a technical to explore all this but felt like good idea to try here. Not sure if it is the right place .

You can build something like this, where validators use secure multiparty computation to sign statements on other chains.

It’s a neat design, but the difficulty is that this would require Tezos bakers to run a node for every single chain they intend to validate. I think you could justify it for one or two important chains, but not for the entire gamut of chains of interest.

The other approach is to build optimistic light clients for other chains, and optimistic rollups are a good place to do that. Essentially you let people make assertions about the state of other chains, and have those assertions potentially disputed via light client proofs. Interesting design but not every chain lends itself well to light client verification and you would need a way to charge the light client logic every time the other chain protocol changes.

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I would gladly run a bitcoin node to have a trustless bridge with bitcoin and have real trustless BTC on our chain.