Author: Haotian, Source: Author’s Twitter @tmel0211
In accordance with the ZK Credo Manifesto, @zksync has recently completed the decentralization of the Ecosystem Portal, Block Explorer, and the official Cross-Bridge, and has made these core parts open source and provided services by third-party technology parties.
However, what is puzzling is that the "official cross-chain bridge" involving major asset deposit and withdrawal channels was actually handed over to the little-known @TxFusion_io.
Why? How to interpret this matter?
Generally speaking, ecosystem data analysis services and auxiliary product functions such as browsers are generally provided by community builders. For example, mainstream public chain projects such as Etherscan behind Ethereum all come from community builders. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why zkSync handed over ecosystem DApp data analysis, ranking and browser presentation to three well-known technical teams such as Dappradar and l2scan.
This will allow win-win advantages to complement each other, and Matter labs can focus on technology development and the advancement of ZK Stack's technical architecture, including: shared Sequencer, shared zkPorter and other technical components. This will benefit both the community and the team.
Because there are many teams in the blockchain community that provide data analysis services, such as dune analytics, 0xScope, nansen, etc., their biggest pain point is the business model. The to C charging model is difficult to cover the high operating costs. For to B services, most project parties are used to doing it themselves and are unwilling to hand it over to others, which makes a large number of data service companies have a hard time. If a large number of project parties follow zkSync, it will bring new vitality to such technical service companies. (But I won’t expand on this.)
However, zkSync actually gave the "official cross-chain bridge", a technical component related to the security of layer2 assets, to a brand new startup - TxFusion. I looked up a lot of information, but I couldn't find out what TxFusion is. But I found some interesting points:
1) TxFusion’s first blog was published on February 21 this year. It did not disclose the investors and the team was relatively vague, but the opening article mentioned cooperation with zkSync, which seemed to be specially designed for zkSync.
2) Ines Isliami, founder of TxFusion, has had data-related experience in blockchain-related companies such as Blockchain Collective, HyperGrowth, and Shard Labs since 2020, but the experience was not long;
3) There was a video interview with Ines Isliam, the founder of TxFusion. His accent is very similar to that of Alex, the founder of zkSync. They are probably both Russian.
I have only seen these news, so I am confused as to why zkSync handed over the cross-chain bridge to TxFusion. However, as a blogger who has been following zkSync for a long time, I personally understand the motivation behind it, and I will share it briefly:
The core is that zkSyn is not willing or willing to recognize the existence of the "official cross-chain bridge".
On the one hand, the cross-chain bridge is the lifeline of L2 security. Simply put, any asset circulating in L2 is a mapped asset in the form of Wrap. Generally speaking, any asset circulating in L2 is a restricted circulating asset before the "hacker" withdraws the asset back to the main chain, whether it is attacked by hackers or Rugpull.
The Rollup mainnet contract can completely block the flow of suspected L2 assets back to the mainnet through Update, thereby achieving control over sudden abnormal situations. Now mainstream layer2s all have a preset Security Council, and the main responsibility of the multi-signature committee behind it is to decide whether to upgrade the contract to control suspected assets in times of crisis.
However, the upgradeable feature reserved by the Rollup contract has been criticized for being centralized and has never been discussed publicly. Alex said in an interview that even if the multi-signature committee has the authority, it can only suspend assets, and the decision on assets is left to the DAO community. But this explanation can only be heard, because once layer2 suffers a huge asset attack, such as a contract being issued several Trillion assets out of thin air, it seems feasible to buy out Layer2 assets and vote on DAO governance.
On the other hand, Alex published an article discussing the use of the Supreme Court's layered governance mechanism to manage layer 2, but that proposal will eventually trigger the possibility of a hard fork of the main network. Impossible, the current layer 2 cannot have the authority to decide whether the main network forks or not, this can only remain in the conceptual stage.
It can be seen that Alex has been anxious about the contradiction between security and decentralization for a long time.
If the term "official cross-chain bridge" is withdrawn, more assets will be distributed across various third-party cross-chain bridges, which will correspondingly weaken the problem of centralized management authority of the Rollup governance contract.
This layout sounds reasonable, but it is only a stopgap measure. After all, even if it is a third-party cross-chain bridge, as long as the liquidity control reaches a certain scale, there will be a risk of centralization. How does TxFusion actually make a cross-chain bridge? I hope the official will disclose the technical details. For example, if TxFusion's Portal and Bridge encounter similar security crises in the future, how will zkSync respond? This question cannot be answered now, so we have to wait and see.
