Solana, the smart
contract platform that recently entered the spotlight thanks to FTX’s
Serum, announced the upcoming release of what it says is a decentralized
bridge for Ethereum ERC-20 tokens.

Called Wormhole, the bridge
would allow users to transfer value between the different blockchains,
turning ERC-20 tokens into Solana’s corresponding SPL standard.

The
bridge is currently being audited by Kudelski, a major Swiss security
firm. Anatoly Yakovenko, the CEO of Solana, told Cointelegraph that
release is expected for the end of October. A beta of the bridge will be
available to developers in a Oct. 28 hackathon, with a full release
expected soon after.

Wormhole uses a set of “guardians” picked
from Solana’s existing validators on the proof-of-stake network. The
company explained that Wormhole is a Proof of Authority network
borrowing trust and identities from the main chain.

Guardians are
responsible for reading data from both blockchains and verifying the
correct operation of the bridge. When two-thirds of the validators sign
for the correctness of a particular transaction, smart contracts on both
sides mint and burn the corresponding token amounts to trigger the
transfer.

The system appears to work in a similar way to federated
bridging seen on Bitcoin sidechains like Liquid or RSK, though the
guardians do not seem to be direct custodians of the assets in the
bridge.

The Wormhole nodes are able to decide on the new guardian
set, which the company says is “established with an off-chain governance
system.”

Yakovenko added that “Wormhole is just step one.” The
team is working on a parallel implementation that would feature on-chain
light clients, which could eliminate the need for any type of concrete
validator. “These different bridges have tradeoffs between how fast they
can be built, user speed, cost, and decentralization but you can
combine them to have the best of both worlds,” he explained.

Solana is currently home to Serum, an order book-based decentralized exchange
developed by FTX. Up to now, Ethereum liquidity could only make its way
to Solana through FTX’s wrapping service. Wormhole would add another
option for traders wishing to use Serum and other protocols.

Yakovenko
also cited a few other DeFi protocols currently building on Solana,
including Stardust, Terra, Ramp DeFi, Anchor and REN.

Solana
claims a transaction rate of more than 50,000 transactions per second,
which is achieved through a variation of the Practical Byzantine Fault
Tolerance algorithm seen in blockchains like NEO. The core idea behind
its architecture is to have a network that is at least as fast as a
single node, which means eliminating bandwidth bottlenecks that often
limit scalability on other chains. This allows the blockchain node software to be strongly parallelized, in contrast to many other chains that do not leverage the multi-threading capabilities of today’s hardware.

source link : https://cointelegraph.com/news/solana-set-to-launch-decentralized-ethereum-bridge-to-power-defi