Blockchain 103 (Bridges)

January 1, 0001

Problem

I want to send money from one blockchain to another but I don’t trust financial intermediaries.

Solution

Create a trust-minimized way for blockchains to interact.

Context

A blockchain is designed to account for all possible state conditions - the combination of accounts, transactions, data, etc.. It is not designed to interpret information from other systems, the same way a store isn’t designed to accept gift cards from other stores.

There is one exception: some blockchains are designed using specific frameworks so that they can share information with other blockchains built on the same framework. We discuss these frameworks in more detail in the next article (link).

Aside from this exception, this design inhibits users from moving information between blockchains. There are a couple of reasons that moving information is desirable:

How can a user send BTC (Bitcoin token) from the Bitcoin blockchain to the Ethereum blockchain or vice versa?

Bridges

https://medium.com/1kxnetwork/blockchain-bridges-5db6afac44f8

https://ethereum.org/en/bridges/

opinions on safety of non-native assets

https://old.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/rwojtk/ama_we_are_the_efs_research_team_pt_7_07_january/hrngyk8/

light client

burn and mint

general message passing