At the end of March, Ronin Bridge, an Ethereum sidechain built for the widely popular play-to-earn (P2E) NFT game Axie Infinity, to handle the growing demand from gamers, was sold for 173,600 ETH (ETH) and 25.5 million USD. Was hacked for more – a combined value of more than $600 million.
The company’s official report regarding the hack states that the hackers managed to access validator nodes, resulting in the compromise of five validator nodes, a threshold also required to approve a transaction.
Currently, there are nine validator nodes in the Ronin chain, and hackers managed to gain access to four of them and a third-party validator operated by Axi DAO. This was the root cause of the Axi DAO node exploit last year. The DAO gave its access to Sky Mavis, the developers behind the game, to sign the transaction on its behalf. Because access was never revoked, hackers took advantage of it to their advantage by turning it into backdoor access, leading to a multimillion-dollar hack.
Following the exploitation, the Ronin Bridge was closed, and all deposits and withdrawals were stopped for investigative purposes.
In response to the hack, Axi Infinity co-founder and COO Alexander Leonard Larsson said at the time that he would be adding several new validators to the Ronin network to further decentralize the network. The game developers also promised to increase the number of validator nodes from nine to 21 in the future.
inevitable future
In the end, Sky Mavis managed to raise $150 million from crypto exchange Binance and other investors to reimburse affected users.
But not every project can afford to bail out its users, and according to data from Dune Analytics, more than $21 billion of funds are locked on Ethereum bridges.
Furthermore, bridge hacks are becoming increasingly common in the cryptocurrency industry. Data from Chain Analysis shows that over $1 billion in cryptocurrency has been stolen in a single year due to weakness in bridges in seven separate incidents.
While many believe that the most important potential point of failure in crypto is the bridge, others maintain that this is not true. “Bridges are an incredibly important piece of infrastructure at the moment,” said Jump Crypto President Kanav Kariya in an interview following the $300 million hack of the Wormhole Bridge. “We are firmly moving towards a multi-series world.”
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has warned that bridges have “fundamental security limits”, although he is optimistic about the “multi-chain blockchain future”. Meanwhile, popular commentator “ChainLinkGod” has stressed that “implementation and adoption of cross-chain smart contracts and token bridges is inevitable,” and “given that this is going to happen, the goal is to avoid cross-chain.” Shouldn’t be for, but there is security in place.”
A decentralized, non-custodial bridge
This is why dotOracle, the first decentralized, non-custodial liquidity bridge on the Casper network, is more secure. After all, the more decentralized a blockchain bridge is, the more secure it is.
To ensure the decentralization and security of the bridge, the dotoracle bridge will have about 15 validator nodes which will be further expanded in Phase 2 after the mainnet version is stable.
DotOracle is a decentralized network of independent nodes designed to be censorship-resistant. It can continue to provide its service as long as two-thirds of the network nodes are online.
The project is building a decentralized oracle and cross-chain liquidity network (bridge) primarily on the Casper Network, a future-proof, proof-of-stake blockchain built from the Casper CBC specification.
Casper is designed to fast-track enterprise and developer adoption of blockchain technology today and meet user needs in the future.
transfer assets safely
DotOracle provides fast confirmation of asset transfers with the highly secure Distributed Consensus Protocol (PBFT). Meanwhile, the non-custodial service is provided through the Elliptic Curve (EC) multi-signature scheme, meaning users have full control over their assets during the transfer.
Another feature of DotOracle is the bonded network with slashing, which means any node must deposit an amount of DTO tokens into DotOracle smart contracts. Violation of the mechanism burns token deposits, which discourages validator abuse.
This robust penalty reduction mechanism has been implemented to incentivize each node to follow the protocol to be rewarded in the DTO by providing fair service to the users.
DTO is a governance token with a total supply of 100 million. The validators in the DTO are rewarded for providing service to DotOracle. Any node can operate, but in order to become a validator node, one must deposit a minimum of 500,000 DTOs into dotOracle smart contracts.
Recently, DotOracle launched its multi-chain bridge testnet, which aims to move digital assets back and forth between different blockchains in a fast, decentralized, secure manner.
This coming quarter, the team will launch its mainnet that will allow you to move assets between all chains supported by the DotOracle Network, including Casper Network, Moonbeam Polkadot, Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Phantom, Avalanche, TomoChain, and more.