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Avalanche growth sparks third-party cross-chain bridges

February 17, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Avalanche

Avalanche blockchain launched its own official Ethereum bridge in 2021, but now a third-party cross-chain bridge claims to reduce transaction cost even further.

Avalanche (AVAX), a Layer-1 proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain network, gets a new cross-chain bridge from Umbria Network to help traders transfer liquidity between Ethereum mainnet and the Avalanche blockchain.

Avalanche blockchain supports multiple virtual machines, including WebAssembly (WASM) and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), allowing different sub-chains to incorporate a specific way of operations.

Multiple virtual machine support enables easy connection with Avalanche. The network launched its official Ethereum bridge in 2021 to allow the two-way transfer of ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens across the two blockchains. But its growth as a network, along with its native token AVAX seeing serious gains over the last few months, led to the creation of third-party cross-chain bridges.

Narni, a new cross-chain bridge by the Umbria Network, promises to offer a 90% cheaper transaction fee compared to the official AVAX bridge. The platform claimed its bespoke system that uses single asset liquidity pools and a custom oracle protocol that reduces the computational complexity of bridging and thus reduces the cost by up to 90%.

Talking about the role of AVAX and cross-chain bridges, Barney Chambers, Co-founder and co-lead developer of Umbria, explained to Cointelegraph that the Avalanche blockchain allows decentralized applications that are not economically feasible on Ethereum. He added:

“Umbria is acting as the glue between all of the L1 and L2 blockchains, enabling users to move their assets in a cheap and timely manner. At Umbria, we envision that, in the future, users will not even need to know what blockchain they are using,”

Cross-chain bridges have become a lifeline for the decentralized finance ecosystem, especially when the gas fee issue on Ethereum fails to die down and seems it will remain persistent until the transition to ETH 2.0. Avalanche, BNB Chain, Solana and Tezos come forward as popular blockchains with a cross-chain bridge support.

Binance Smart Chain becomes BNB Chain

February 15, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Binance

Binance Smart Chain became quite popular as an Ethereum alternative during the latter's peak of network congestions and gas fee issues.

Decentralized blockchain ecosystem Binance Smart Chain (BSC) today announced that it is taking a new name, BNB Chain, in a bid to reflect its connection with the native token of the ecosystem Binance Coin (BNB).

According to the release, BNB now stands for "Build and Build" instead of short for Binance Coin. Powered by BNB, the BNB Chain would introduce advanced capabilities and focus on building Web3 infrastructure.

Under the freshly-named BNB Chain umbrella, the chain governance part, the Binance Chain, where staking and voting happens, has become BNB Beacon Chain. On the other hand, the EVM-compatible, multichain-supporting Binance Smart Chain is simply named BNB Smart Chain, still shortened as BSC.

The BNB Chain will bring all its Web3 development under the umbrella of MetaFi that will bring together developers and projects from the metaverse along with GameFi and SocialFi. The BNB Chain would bring large-scale applications and developer tools while expanding the validator set from 21 to 41 with a focus on scalability.

Cointelegraph reached out to Binance for more info, and this article will be updated with the response.

Binance Smart Chain was launched in September 2020 as an alternative to Ethereum blockchain and mimicked the platform in its operation with a lower transaction cost and time of processing. In a short time span, BSC became a popular choice for DeFi developers and NFT projects due to ease of operations, interoperability and low cost. The rebranding comes as an attribute to the next leg of the journey that will combine DeFi and virtual reality in the metaverse.

Bunny and Qubit turns to DAO following $80 million bug exploit

February 11, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Bunny and Qubit turns to DAO following million bug exploit

BSC

The exploit took place on the Ethereum-BSC bridge that saw the hacker use $185 million as collateral to steal $80 million worth of tokens from lending pools.

The development team behind Bunny Finance and Qubit has decided to disband the protocol and turn it into a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

In an official medium post published on Friday, The Bunny Finance team announced that the exploit on Qubit that resulted in $80 million worth of loss has made it impossible for the team to operate at full scale. Thus, they have decided to disband the protocols and give authority to the community.

As reported earlier by Cointelegraph, the Qubit bridge called X-bridge facilitated tokens swaps from Ethereum (ETH) to Binance Smart Chain (BSC). The hacker behind the attack managed to exploit a "logical error” in the X-Bridge smart contract that allowed them to withdraw tokens on the BSC chain without depositing any on Ethereum.

pic.twitter.com/G1WOMglVUU
— Qubit Finance (@QubitFin) January 28, 2022

The hacker managed to steal 77,162 qXETH worth $185 million and used it as collateral to borrow several assets from the lending pools worth $80 million. The borrowed tokens included 15,688 Wrapped Ether (wETH) worth $37.6 million, 767 BTC-B ($28.5 million), $9.5 million worth of stablecoin and $5 million worth of PancakeSwap (CAKE), Pancake Bunny (BUNNY) and MDX tokens.

The official announcement noted that moving forward, the community will be in charge of major decision making including upgrading contracts, altering fee structure. In order to change the protocols to DAO, the development team has shut down vaults on Bunny which will no longer mint the native token. The team is also shutting down leveraged Farming Vaults and Single Asset Vaults on Qubit that were used to borrow assets.

The development team has also decided to discontinue major fee structures barring unstaking and compounding fees. The team would also launch a new market on Qubit and get rid of the old model that was hacked. All team tokens would be locked in a community smart contract and profits from the contract would be utilized as a compensation pool. The existing members of the team would participate as a member of the DAO.

BSC

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