Last week, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), expressed his disapproval of the emergence of cross-chain bridges, citing security vulnerabilities due to their interdependence. However, in the days that followed, developers working on cross-chain technologies largely dismissed their skepticism. In a statement to Cointelegraph, Kadan Stadelmann, CTO of atomic swap blockchain Komodo, responded to Vitalik’s criticism:
“What we ultimately need is true decentralization. For example, instead of relying on one or two trusted bridges that have a single point of failure, we’d be better off working toward a future where we have numerous bridges that are secure, trustless and censorship resistant.”
Erik Ashdown, head of ecosystem growth at blockchain indexing and data analytics firm Covalent, concurred:
Vitalik is an intelligent person who has clearly given some thought to the state of the bridges. However, his claim that bridges are a bad idea and won’t work is the equivalent of the Bitcoin community saying in 2015 that Ethereum and smart contracts were a bad idea.”
Stadelmann further reiterated that “cross-chain interoperability is the future” and that both multi-chain ecosystem networks such as Polkadot (DOT) and Cosmos (ATOM), as well as decentralized atomic exchanges, could potentially alter the economic size of Ethereum. In support of this claim, Stadelmann cites expensive gas fees on the blockchain as a reason why users would prefer alternatives.
However, there are unresolved issues surrounding cross-blockchains. Ashdown cites an example of smart contract composability, where sending a token across one bridge will not have the same contract address if it crosses from another bridge. This means that anyone else sending a token through another bridge will not be able to interact with the original tokens sent from the main bridge.