Why is TxFusion so important? Why did zkSync Era hand over the official cross-chain bridge to it?
Original author: Haotian (Twitter/X:@tmel0211）
In accordance with the ZK Credo manifesto, zkSync Era has recently completed the decentralization of Ecosystem Portal, Block Explorer and official Cross-Bridge, and made these core parts open source and provided by third-party technology parties.
However, what is puzzling is that the official cross-chain bridge involving the deposit and withdrawal channels of major assets was actually handed over to a little-knownTxFusion. Why? How to interpret this?
Generally speaking, auxiliary product functions such as ecological data analysis services and 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 that zkSync hands over ecological DApp data analysis, ranking and browser rendering to three well-known technical teams such as Dappradar and l2s can.
In this way, the advantages of win-win can be complementary, and Matter labs can focus on technology development and promotion of ZK Stack technical architecture, including: sharing Sequencer, sharing zkPorter and other technical components. This benefits both the community and the team.
Because there are many teams in the blockchain community that provide data analysis services, such as dune analytics, 0x Scope, nansen, etc., their biggest pain point is the business model. The charging model of to C is difficult to cover the high operating costs. Most project parties are accustomed to doing the services of to B themselves and are unwilling to hand them over to others. This makes a large number of data service companies have a very difficult time. If a large number of project parties follow zkSyncs example, it will bring new vitality to such technical service companies. (but expanded too much)
However, for the official cross-chain bridge, a technical component related to layer 2 asset security, zkSync was handed over to a brand new Starup-TxFusion. I checked a lot of information, but I didnt find out why TxFusion is so sacred? But I found some interesting points:
1) TxFusion’s earliest blog was published on February 21 this year. The investor was not disclosed and the team was relatively vague. However, the opening article mentioned cooperation with zkSync, which seemed to be specifically designed for zkSync.
2) Ines Islami, founder of TxFusion, has had data-related experience in blockchain-related companies such as Blockchain Collective, HyperGrowth, and Shard Labs since 2020, but the time has not been long;
3) TxFusion founder Ines Islam has a video interview. His accent is very similar to that of zkSync founder Alex, and they are probably Russian.
I have seen these messages so far, so I am confused as to why zkSync hands over the cross-chain bridge to TxFusion.However, as a blogger who has been paying attention to zkSync dynamics for a long time, I personally understand the motivation behind it. Let me 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, because the cross-chain bridge is the L2 security lifeline. To simply understand, any asset circulating in L2 is a mapped asset in the form of Wrap. Generally, any asset circulating in L2 is subject to hacker attacks or rugpull as long as the hacker can withdraw the asset back to the main chain. of circulating assets.
The Rollup mainnet contract can completely block the flow of L2 suspected assets back to the mainnet through Update, thereby achieving control of sudden abnormal situations. Now mainstream layer 2 has a default Security Council. The main responsibility of the multi-signature committee behind it is to decide whether to upgrade the contract to control suspect assets in times of crisis.
However, the upgradeable features reserved for the Rollup contract have been criticized for being centralized and have not been discussed on the table. Alex said in the interview that even if the multi-signature committee has the authority, it can only suspend assets, and the decision-making about assets is left to the DAO community. But this explanation can only be heard, because once layer 2 is attacked by a huge amount of assets, for example, a certain contract is issued several Trillion assets out of thin air, it seems feasible to buy out the assets of layer 2 and do a DAO governance vote.
On the other hand, Alex published an article exploring the use of the Supreme Courts layer-by-layer governance mechanism to manage layer 2, but that proposal will eventually trigger the possibility of a hard fork on the mainnet. Impossible. It is impossible for the current layer 2 to have the authority to decide whether to fork the main network. This can only stay in the imagination stage.
It can be seen that Alex has been anxious about the contradiction between security and decentralization for a long time.
This layout sounds reasonable, but it is only a temporary solution. After all, even if it is a third-party cross-chain bridge, there will be centralization risks as long as the liquidity control reaches a certain scale. How does TxFusion build a cross-chain bridge? I hope the official can disclose the technical details. For example, if similar security crises occur in TxFusions Portal and Bridge in the future, how will zkSync respond? There is no answer to this question now, lets wait and see.
