On August 2, token bridge Nomad became another victim of a cross-chain attack after the protocol suffered a breach that resulted in the theft of $190 million. Joining the list of victims along with Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge and Solana’s Wormhole protocol, many industry insiders have cast doubt on the future of cross-chain technologies. However, not all cross-chain toolkits have been exploited so far. In this regard, Cointelegraph has spoken with the Osmosis co-founder Sunny Aggarwal. Osmosis is one of the most popular decentralized exchanges, or DEXs, on the Cosmos hub with $120 million in total value locked. Here is what Aggarwal had to say about the Cosmos Inter-Blockchain Communications (IBC) protocol:
“The major bridge hacks are a reminder to victims that bridges are, in fact, too fragile to be allowed to hold significant amounts of capital at this stage of their life cycle. High-profile bridge hacks throw up shed light on IBC as the most viable solution for cross-chain bridging, as this understanding acts as an opportunity for the rest of the EVM-based ecosystems to look at IBC as a serious alternative for doing cross-chain communication.”
Today, there are almost fifty blockchains using IBC to perform more than 10 million transactions daily, in an ecosystem with more than a billion dollars in assets under management, despite the market downturn. “The totally reliable nature of the system is what makes [el IBC] works so well” Aggarwal said.
The DeFi architect pointed to a recent example that illustrates the resilience of the IBC: “A major test for the Osmosis DEX came when Terra Luna crashed. Most of our namesake OSMO tokens that were locked resided in the LUNA/OSMO and UST/OSMO pools. To prevent a malicious actor from minting infinite LUNA and draining OSMO staking pools, the Osmosis governance implemented a trading halt on IBC’s Osmosis-Terra channels.”
According to Aggarwal, IBC’s ability to distribute points of failure through cross-chain sovereignty is precisely what keeps it “the most secure bridge protocol out there.” To date, more than $2 billion worth of funds have been stolen in cross-chain protocols, accounting for 69% of all stolen cryptocurrencies in that period.
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