cBridge 2.0, unveiled less than two months ago and powered by the upgraded State Guardian Network (SGN), is now live on mainnet! In the first phase of the launch, users will be able to transfer USDT, USDC, and ETH across Avalanche, Arbitrum, BSC, ETH, Fantom, and Polygon within minutes and with significantly reduced costs. Liquidity Providers (LPs) have the option to provide liquidity to highly efficient pool contracts without the overhead of operating cBridge nodes. Developers of dApps can directly integrate with the cBridge 2.0 SDK and enable a native multi-chain user experience.
Additional features and functions such as liquidity mining, incentive programs, and upgraded State Guardian Network staking and earnings based on transaction fees have already been fully built and tested. In the effort of a smooth, safe, and secure transition from 1.0 to 2.0, these features will be enabled in batches according to a multi-phase launch schedule. Other major features like arbitrary message passing SDK, NFT bridging, and Non-EVM chain support (e.g. Solana and Terra) are being built, tested, and will be added in a future version.
You can learn more details about how to use cBridge 2.0 through our tutorial.
What’s Available in cBridge 2.0?
With the launch of the shared liquidity pool mode in this version, cBridge 2.0 brings the best-in-class experiences to both users and liquidity providers. We also enable $CELR stakers and validators to capture direct value from the State Guardian Network via transaction fees. Specifically, here are some of the changes and advantages that cBridge 2.0 offers compared to version 1.0 or other systems:
For Users
- The ability to make larger cross-chain transactions.
- A one-click user experience for cross-chain bridging.
- The ability to directly receive unwrapped gas tokens.
- Liquidity-supply-based efficient pricing between chains and tokens.
For Liquidity Providers
- The ability to easily add liquidity to smart contract pools managed by the SGN without being required to run a node.
- LPs are not required to mint synthetic tokens and therefore, are not exposed to the volatile settlement tokens that occur in some AMM designs.
- Access to high liquidity efficiency by directly adding and managing bare-metal tokens without the complex AMM routing.
- Explicit liquidity attribution to allow LPs to easily profit from active cross-chain arbitraging.
For Developers
- An easy-to-integrate SDK that enables users to have a full-fledged multi-chain experience natively available in their blockchain wallets and dApps. Such as multi-chain DEXs, Metaverse games, NFT marketplaces, and DeFi aggregators.
For CELR Stakers and Validators in the SGN
- The ability to directly capture the value of cBridge via fees paid for processing transactions on the SGN blockchain.
- Governance of all system parameters for cBridge.
- NOTE: This functionality is fully built and tested but will not be immediately released. It will be rolled out according to the multi-phase launch plan.
Since cBridge 2.0’s architecture contains two modes of operations for liquidity providers. It is important to note that, in this version, the operation mode of “SGN as a cBridge node gateway and Service Level Agreement (SLA) arbitrator” is not yet available.
What About Security?
As discussed previously, the multi-chain interoperability and bridging space has experienced a series of hacking incidents with some of them ranking as some of the largest hacks in the Internet’s history. These incidents serve as a strong reminder that security is and always should be considered above all else.
cBridge 2.0 is a first-of-its-kind interoperability system, where the SGN, a tendermint-based PoS blockchain, serves as the fabric that interconnects multiple blockchains together. Cross-chain pricing, direct staking value capture, liquidity mining, and liquidity management mechanisms are all cutting-edge innovations within cBridge 2.0. With this many “firsts”, we’ve made the following efforts to work towards a smooth, safe, and secure transition.
Pre-launch Security Due Diligence
- Open-sourcing: Our bridging and new State Guardian Network smart contract components are fully open-source.
- Smart contract audits: We have had three independent audits on our bridging smart contracts as well as the new SGN staking contracts from Certik, Peckshield and SlowMist. They have found no critical issues and all non-critical issues and suggestions have been resolved or acknowledged as intended behavior.
- Cross-team review: We have done some very extensive internal cross-team security reviews for mission-critical code components.
- In-system safeguarding: For the transition period, we’ve implemented a few in-system safeguarding features such as bridging volume rate limiting, based on the best practices for safe launching.
As the cBridge system becomes more mature and battle-tested, guard rails and limits will be removed from the system.
A $2 Million Bug Bounty
In past exploits of other interoperability solutions, bug bounties have often been offered as part of a post-mortem negotiation with hackers and whitehats. However, at that point, the damage has already been done. Hence it basically defeats the key purpose of a bug bounty: the prevention of exploits before they happen.
With this in mind, we have committed $2M to a cBridge 2.0 bug bounty program in order to show our commitment to top-tier security researchers and whitehat hackers out there. More details and rules on the bug bounty will be released soon with our bug bounty partner.
A Multi-Phase Launch
As we aim for a smooth, safe, and secure mainnet launch of cBridge 2.0, we plan to roll out some of the new features and improvements over several steps. Below you will find the different phases of the transition from 1.0 to 2.0 and what each phase will include. We want to stress that all of the features mentioned below have already been built and we just want to space out the releases in order to help smooth over the transition process. Support for more chains and tokens will be added continuously over the multi-phase launch.
Phase 1: 1.0 to 2.0 transition
Estimated timeline in this phase: about 2 weeks
Goals:
- Transition LPs that are already providing liquidity in 1.0 to 2.0
- Give the system a bit of time in a live production environment
- Allow users and LPs familiarize themselves with the new system operations and expectations
- Work with partners on SDK integration and testing
Limitations:
- Volume rate limiting is in-place
- Liquidity mining is not launched
- Delegation to the new SGN is not available.
Phase 2: deep liquidity bootstrapping
Estimated timeline in this phase: about 1.5 months
Goals:
- Liquidity mining launches in order to bootstrap to a deep liquidity pool
- Other user acquisition and awareness campaigns
- Migrate existing validators from SGN 1.0 to SGN 2.
Limitations:
- Volume rate limiting cap is increased, but still exist
- No staker migration to the new SGN
The details of the liquidity mining campaign and reward schedules will be announced shortly in a separate blog post. Please stay tuned to our twitter account or telegram channels.
Phase 3: SGN staker migration
Goals:
- SGN nodes and delegations will be fully migrated from V1 to V2
- Protocol parameters controlled by decentralized governance
Limitations:
- All volume and system usage hard limits will be removed
What’s Next?
While cBridge 2.0 goes through this multi-phase launch plan, we will continue to iterate and introduce new features at the same kind of execution speed. Here are a few major features that we are currently working on and plan to release. Some of them will be rolled out as part of the multi-phase launch timeline.
Arbitrary Cross-chain Message Passing for NFT and more
To enable cross-chain asset transfers in cBridge 2.0, the State Guardian Network fulfills the role of a cross-chain message fabric already: it relays the transfer-in events happening on the source chain to the destination chain in order to execute the transfer-out action and complete the cross-chain transfer cycle. The functionality is being generalized to be able to pass arbitrary messages between blockchains. With arbitrary message passing, numerous possible use cases are unlocked ranging from NFT, multi-chain native dApps, and customized token bridging. This is a major feature and the architecture of this feature will be discussed in a separate blog post.
Non-EVM chain support: Solana, Terra and Polkadot
cBridge 2.0 has a highly extensible architecture: most of the computation logic exists in the SGN powered bridging fabric with minimized on-chain complexity. Therefore, adding support to non-EVM based chains is very straightforward and only limited by chain-specific “plug-ins” that will need to be built. Solana, Terra and Polkadot are the three most requested non-EVM chains by the community and our developer community has already started contributing to the non-EVM chain plugins for cBridge 2.0.
Self-managed Liquidity Mode
cBridge 2.0’s architecture allows two modes of liquidity management. In this current version, we prioritized the shared pool liquidity mode and will continue to build out the self-managed liquidity mode to cater to different preferences of liquidity providers and cBridge node operators.
