At 14:00 on August 13th, Acala & Karura and Odaily jointly held a live broadcast event of "Tomorrow's Star - Witness the New Game of Kusama Ecological DeFi" to share and discuss the stories behind the Kusama auction and the future from the perspective of bidding front-line project parties. Discover new opportunities in the Polkadot ecosystem. (Click to enter video playback）
Meter CEO Zhu Xiaohan delivered a keynote speech "How to win the DeFi Holy Grail? Bring cross-chain smart contracts to Kusama" at the event. Zhu Xiaohan said that Meter launched a cross-chain routing solution in May this year that supports multi-chain asset transfers and smart contract cross-chain communication and calls. Meter will be like an Internet router in the future, supporting high-performance consensus and state synchronization between cross-chain repeaters at the bottom layer, so that smart contracts between EVM chains can communicate directly, but the application layer does not need to be aware of the Meter network.
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The following is the full text of the speech, organized by Odaily:
Hello everyone, I am Meter CEO.
In fact, Meter is not a native project of Polka, but after communicating with you this time, I found that there are many things that can be learned from the Polka ecology and your gameplay. I hope that we can provide some support for the Polka ecology through some of our technical solutions.
Let me introduce Meter first. Meter itself is a high-performance side chain of Ethereum. We are now using the HotStuff consensus. There are 115 community nodes on the main network. It is currently the side chain with the best performance and the highest degree of decentralization. We use Pow mining to generate Semi-stable currency, used as Gas in the system. Related to today's topic, as a side chain, the cross-chain bridge is very important to us. Since last summer, we have started to run the cross-chain bridge, first running the cross-chain bridge within our own ecology , In January of this year, we began to help the Avalanche team operate the cross-chain bridge. In the middle, I have accumulated a lot of development, operation and maintenance and security experience related to cross-chain bridges. Basically, all kinds of pits have been stepped on, but there has never been a safety problem. During this process, we communicated with many Polkadot systems and found that each chain runs a cross-chain bridge by itself, which is very troublesome from the perspective of security and operation and maintenance. Many applications now also want to deploy multi-chain versions, which require a cross-chain infrastructure. We not only meet our own project needs, but also help other projects. Why don’t we simply build an underlying infrastructure that everyone can share, and provide everyone with a safe and easy-to-use cross-chain service platform.
Meter launched a cross-chain routing solution that supports multi-chain asset transfers and smart contract cross-chain communication and calls in May this year. Meter will be like an Internet router in the future, supporting high-performance consensus and state synchronization between cross-chain repeaters at the bottom layer, so that smart contracts between EVM chains can communicate directly, but the application layer does not need to be aware of the Meter network. On this basis, Meter has helped the AMPL team launch multi-chain AMPL assets. At the same time, Meter will also cooperate with Moonbeam, Acala and other teams to help them build asset cross-chain bridges that can link mainstream public chains. The cross-chain experience provided by Meter is relatively smooth, especially the transfer and call between the Polkadot parachain and other high-performance EVM chains only takes 10-20 seconds.
The reason for doing this is to share with you our views on the future evolution of the blockchain. We feel that the development of the blockchain is very similar to the development of the Internet. The early network development is a local area network, which is very similar to Ethereum, solana and other single-chain systems. They only focus on the degree of decentralization, performance and security. Different trade-offs were made. But fundamentally speaking, all programs and applications on the network are competing for a shared resource. No matter how big the bragging is, it will not be enough in the end. But in fact, the Internet did not develop like this. The history of Internet development tells us that there will be many heterogeneous networks, and the heterogeneous networks are connected through routers and IP protocols. Users of each network do not need to change their own usage habits, nor do they need to change their existing applications, but routers connect applications through protocol conversion. So we think that the future development of the blockchain world is likely to follow this idea. Especially after Polkadot becomes ecological, there will be a large number of parallel chains, which will generate a large cloud, but between it and the cloud of Ethereum and other blockchain clouds, some routers are needed to connect them to each other In order to have the best financial Internet experience and provide users with convenient services. So what we want to do at Meter is to provide high-performance and secure router backbone nodes on the financial Internet.
Recently, many cross-chain bridges have been hacked. The most concerned issue is how to solve the security problem. Whether it is computer software or the design of the blockchain, the simpler things can be done, the higher the security. If you want to do a good job in security, you first need to simplify this problem. I don’t know if you have noticed that the cross-chain projects that have been hacked recently actually have a common feature. They want to build something like Swap internally, and they tie the underlying information transmission work with the upper-level business. In fact, a router is a very simple thing. It just helps a program to transfer information from one program to another on the Internet, and helps the two programs complete a communication function. This matter can be done in a very simple way, but if you have to tie a lot of business to it, it is easy to introduce new problems. Just like your home WiFi router, if you have to run a windows system on it, it is basically impossible to have no problems. Our routing scheme is to do the most simplified processing, and is only responsible for information transmission between different chains. At the beginning, we used various cross-chain bridges and developed many versions ourselves. What we are releasing now is developed based on our operating experience. We will soon have new solutions that will support more relays nodes, the cost will be lower.
Take the transfer or transfer of information from Ethereum to an EVM chain in Kusama, such as Karura, as an example. Bridge contract cross-chain events on Ethereum will be monitored by relay nodes. There are currently five professional relay nodes operating on our network, three of which operate avalanche, Ethereum and cross-chain bridges. At the peak, there were more than 300 million U.S. dollars in assets on the bridge, and no one has been issued so far. security issues. There are also two other nodes, which are super nodes on BSC and many other chains. The security of the cross-chain is currently through voting on the target chain. If three of the current five relay nodes pass, the transaction transfer can be completed. If hackers attack, at least they need to successfully steal the private keys of three professional node operators at the same time. Basically, it is still in a credible decentralized environment. Since the cross-chain relay is special, especially in a very complex cross-chain environment, it is necessary to maintain many full nodes of different chains, which has high requirements for operation, maintenance and management. We feel that even in the final state, it is still Some very professional node service providers operate these services.
I will share these with you today, hoping to have some in-depth cooperation with various projects on Polka to help you solve some cross-chain problems.
