It’s said a lot that IBC is HARD to add to other chains. Why why why is this ser? There are very technical reasons why, but here are the three main reasons that should be understandable: Finality IBC needs finality, which means a previous block on a blockchain is not going…

Overlay Networks are virtual machines which allow you to program at the network layer, and create beautiful experiences for developers and users. Here, we are considering unconnected L1s like Ethereum and Polkadot as Underlay Networks, and programmable interoperability protocols like Axelar as Overlay Networks. …

Cross-chain generalised message passing is a primitive which will unlock blockchain overlay networks, and with them, a new era of blockchain computational power and usability. The internet was just as hard to scale as blockchains. Recently, I was reading a paper on overlay networks written by researchers at Akamai, an…

The passage which inspired our recent rabbit hole journey into overlay networks. Co-dreamed by Postman and Jackson Virgo @_nEquals1 It’s creepy how well this works. Akamai, founded in 1998, is one of the most important companies behind the internet, yet nearly no consumer knows about them. below is an excerpt…

When I first heard that a world with millions of blockchains is possible, I kind of lost my mind. Blockchains/shards/roll-ups, whatever you call them, there may very well be millions of them. A world with billions of computers sounded impossible in 1960, too. In order to get there and get…

In part 1 we looked at some frameworks for understanding cross chain protocols and assessing their security. In this post, we’re going to apply these ideas to IBC, Nomad, LayerZero and Axelar. Together, these cover a nice range of cross-chain protocol types. Taking requests to add more. IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol) Github Discord Twitter …

Useful concepts for analysing security of cross chain protocols. Safety Safety means nothing bad happens. Think Ronin/wormhole hack. Someone steals ⅔ of the validators’ keys and is now able to validate a hostile transaction. Another example is someone finds a random bug which sends all the votes to themselves. Liveness Liveness asserts…

A vision for Osmosis, and how Axelar is uniquely positioned to enable it Osmosis has the potential not just to be the primary DEX in Cosmos, but eventually grow into the most valuable DEX in the world, catalyzing DeFi innovation and becoming the fundamental driving force of open finance globally. Axelar’s mission is to create the most secure and seamless cross-chain communication platform…

The world of blockchain interoperability moves fast. In just a few short months, we’ve gone past conversations about pairwise bridges and into conversations about cross chain interoperability networks. As this complexity hits us full force, we’re missing a useful framework for evaluating the architectures of cross chain interoperability networks. I…