Polkadot-Ethereum Bridge November progress update
High Level Updates
Snowfork has been working hard the last few months and has been making good progress on our Polkadot Ethereum bridge. We recently gave a talk at Sub0 on the bridge, which covers an overview of how it works with some diving into the technical details and our updated roadmap and plan: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/axvfinsv/15
Work streams
Since our last post, we’ve scaled up the team and are working in multiple streams focused on different parts of the bridge:
Eth Light Client: An Ethereum Light Client built into a Substrate pallet that will allow trustless verification of Ethereum consensus, proof of work and state. M6 almost done, will be submitted in a few days. M7 started too. No blockers.
Parachain Stream: A parachain for Kusama + Polkadot that will provide bridging support to other parachains for both asset transfer to and from Ethereum as well as sending and receiving arbitrary state.
Polkadot Light Client: A Polkadot Light Client built in Solidity that will allow trustless verification of Polkadot consensus, proof of stake and state that other Ethereum contracts can utilize.
Frontend: A set of marketing, documentation, tutorial and demo websites that will guide both developers and end users to get involved, integrate and use our bridge
All streams are coming along well, and we’ll have a stronger website and web-presence to share in a few weeks!
Technical Updates and upcoming roadmap plans
For the more technically curious, a summary of our current state of progress and roadmap for each stream is below.
Eth Light Client: We have a working pallet that can include and validate new Ethereum mainnet headers, as well as a relayer + prover microservice to stream in new headers. Proof of work verification and following the longest confirmed chain is done. The next few weeks will involve implementing the prover and verifier for transaction receipt inclusion proofs, bloom filters for events so that we update our bridge to be fully trustless for Ethereum -> Polkadot direction communication.
Parachain Stream: We have a working parachain that has been integrated with Cumulus and is running on our own custom fork of the Rococo testnet. We’re also almost done with XCM that will allow other parachains to interact with our bridge. The next few weeks will involve more decisions and implementation around our parachain’s consensus, incentive and fee model for our collator nodes.
Polkadot Light Client: We’ve worked out a clear spec and plan in collaboration with the Web3 Research team for verifying Polkadot Relay chain consensus on Ethereum with some gas optimizations. We also have decided on a specification for how our parachain will create state proofs and allow for cheap verification of state on Ethereum. Solidity implementation of these specs is kicking off soon, and we should have a working proof of concept in a few weeks.
Frontend: We’re building a frontend website that will be a gateway for all interested parties to engage with our bridge. There will be general information for end users as well as developer-centric documentation including tutorials for integration with the bridge, usage from other parachains and examples of development of custom bridge applications. There will also be a front end demo for end users to test out trustless asset transfer between Polkadot and Ethereum and cross-parachain bridging. Our next update will launch these websites :).