Authors: Ben, Zhen, Ying Tong (Akomba Labs).
We thank Dave Appleton (Akomba Labs), Anthony Lusardi (ETC Cooperative), and Loi Luu and Desmond (Kyber Network) for helpful discussions.
Building off Loi Luu's BTC - ETH relay-less bridge described in "Bringing Bitcoin to Ethereum", Peace Bridge is an ETC - ETH bridge that uses co-signed chains of custody to verify transactions across the two chains. By introducing a challenge game and imposing staking requirements, our design addresses the high gas cost issues and employs a trustless Custodian.
The Peace Bridge is best illustrated through example. Consider, without loss of generality, a transfer in the ETC → ETH direction:
Staking, minting, and depositing on the Peace Bridge. Alice mints TETC-A on the foreign Ethereum chain and deposits an equivalent amount of real ETC on her home Ethereum Classic chain.
The peaceBridge is initiated by a Custodian who sets up DepositContract
on the home chain (here, Ethereum Classic) and TokenContract
on the foreign chain (here, Ethereum).
1a. Custodian stakes α
ETC in DepositContract
on the Ethereum Classic chain. DepositContract
is where users will deposit home currency (here, ETC) in order to transact on the foreign chain. α
will define depositCap
, a limit on the amount of ETC that can be deposited in DepositContract
.
1b. Custodian sets up TokenContract
on the Ethereum chain, where users can mint ERC721 TETC tokens. Each separate mint will produce an ERC721 token with a unique tokenId
that cannot be split.
Once both DepositContract
and TokenContract
are set up, and depositCap
is established, exchanges from ETC to TETC may begin.
Each user of the bridge mints on TokenContract
simultaneously or prior to depositing on DepositContract
. This prevents malicious actors from stealing someone else's publicly published deposit and using it to mint tokens they didn't pay for. The process of minting and depositing is detailed as below:
2a. Alice wishes to exchange X
ETC for TETC tokens to be used on the ETH main chain. To do so, she mints X
TETC-A
in TokenContract
(on the ETH chain). Note that TETC-A
is an ERC721 token that has a unique tokenId
and cannot be split.
2b. Alice deposits X
ETC in DepositContract
(on the ETC chain) claiming her mint.
- Alice puts in a request to
TokenContract
to transfer herTETC-A
token to Bob, withdeclaredNonce
= 1. If her transfer is approved, thetransferNonce
ofTETC-A
will be updated from 0 to 1. A token'stransferNonce
begins at 0 at time of minting, and increases by +1 with each approved transfer, thus establishing chronology in the chain of custody. - Custodian approves Alice's transfer request, thus co-signing the transfer of
TETC-A
attransferNonce
= 1. - Ownership of
TETC-A
is successfully transferred to Bob.transferNonce
ofTETC-A
is incremented by 1, signifying thatTETC-A
has undergone one transfer.
In the time before Custodian approves Alice's transfer request, Alice is free to revert the transaction, should she change her mind about transferring her TETC-A
to Bob.
A Withdrawer can use TETC-A
to withdraw()
from DepositContract
, i.e. withdraw Alice's original ETC deposit. She does this by submitting the following information to DepositContract
:
uint256 _tokenId
, the unique tokenId of the TETC-A
token she is trying to redeem
bytes32[] _rawTxBundle
, a bundle containing information about _withdrawalTx
,
_lastTx
, _custodianTx
bytes32[] _txMsgHashes
, the hashes of the values in _rawTxBundle
uint256 _declaredNonce
, the number of transfers of TETC-A
If the withdrawal request is signed by the Custodian and the penultimate owner of the token, DepositContract
opens up a challenge period, during which anyone can submit a proof that the Withdrawer is making a fraudulent withdrawal. A successful Challenger is rewarded with the Withdrawer's stake.
We can reason about the possible fraudulent withdrawals and their corresponding challenge responses by considering the chronology of the withdrawal's declaredNonce
:
To initiate a challenge, a Challenger is required to stake a value equivalent to 20% of Withdrawer's stake, on top of covering the gas costs borne by the Withdrawer in responding to the challenge. This prevents griefing attacks and trigger-happy challenges that slow down the bridge.
At any point, the existence of more than one Custodian-signed transaction at the same nonce and for the same token can be submitted to DepositContract
to prove the Custodian's illegal double-sign. The punishment is as such:
For a token, say TETC-A
, with corresponding deposit X
, we slash TETC-A
's deposit as well as X
-equivalent ETC from the Custodian's stake. Here, the Custodian's penalty increases as a linear function of discovered double-signing instances, thus disincentivising him from double-signing.
To run truffle tests:
npm i
ganache-cli -p 7545 -s=something
truffle test