Trader Joe takes its first step into the Ethereum ecosystem

December 2, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Despite the new multi-chain vision, the Trader Joe team confirmed that its “true home” and “top priority for all growth efforts” will continue to be on Avalanche.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Trader Joe has announced its very first expansion from Avalanche and onto the Ethereum ecosystem, as part of its plans to access new markets and drive up user activity.

The decentralized trading platform announced its “multi-chain” expansion into Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Arbitrum One on Dec. 1 and follows around a month after it stated its intention to expand to additional markets and ink new partnerships amid falling TVL and user activity in the third quarter.

We're extremely excited to announce that @traderjoe_xyz has expanded into the Ethereum ecosystem with Arbitrum One as its destination! ‍ https://t.co/pjnoirxkVi
— Arbitrum (,) (@arbitrum) December 1, 2022

The team stated that they’re working closely with Offchain Labs — the team behind Arbitrum One — to launch a testnet “within the coming days,” before officially deploying it onto the Arbitrum One mainnet in January 2023:

“Deployment to Arbitrum One is the next step in this global expansion effort and we look forward to introducing the innovative AMM built on Avalanche, and also working with new partners to benefit the collective DeFi ecosystems of Arbitrum and Avalanche.”

The deployment comes as Trader Joe has also expanded its ecosystem through partnerships and integrations with wallets, data clients and other vectors” since the second quarter as a means to spread the exposure of Avalanche and the Trader Joe itself.

Among the most notable recent partnerships include that of Trust Wallet and Crypto.com.

Trader Joe added that the protocol’s original AMM — Joe V1 AMM — would also move onto Arbitrum One in addition to the Liquidity Book AMM, which will bring “zero slippage trades and discretized liquidity provisioning to all Arbinauts.”

As for why Trader Joe chose to deploy its AMMs on Arbitrum One, the team said they were impressed by Offchain Labs’ efforts in building an ecosystem of DeFi protocols on the network, which is indicative of its 53.4% market share in total value locked (TVL) across all Ethereum layer-2 scaling solutions.

“Deploying (the) Liquidity Book will be a great addition to the vibrant ecosystem,” the team added.

Image shared by Trader Joe regarding its recent Arbitrum expansion. Source: Joe Content.

Despite announcing that it was “time to go global” on Crypto Twitter, the Trader Joe team confirmed that its “true home” and “top priority for all growth efforts” will continue to be on Avalanche.

Trader Joe also also clarified that its token, JOE, in addition to lending platform Banker Joe, nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace JoePegs and its staking platform would not join Liquidity Book AMM and Joe V1 AMM on Arbitrum “in this initial phase.”

The announcement appears to have a positive impact on the price of JOE, which increased 13.35% from $0.163 to $0.185 over an eight hour period before cooling off to $0.179, according to data from CoinGecko.

Trader Joe is currently the top-ranked decentralized exchange (DEX) and third-ranked DeFi protocol on Avalanche with $94.13 million in TVL, trailing only Ethereum-native lending platform AAVE and Avalanche-based liquid staking provider Benqi, according to data from DeFi aggregator DefiLlama.

Terra Collapse Continues to Plague Defi — Value Locked in Cross-Chain Bridges Down 20% This Month

May 19, 2022 Bitcoin.com

Polygon Reveals Supernets Project to Bolster Web3 Adoption, Pledges $100 Million to Early Users

April 23, 2022 Bitcoin.com

Interchain Accounts is the biggest upgrade to Cosmos since Stargate

February 17, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

The protocols would enable nearly all aspects of data-sharing between blockchain protocols, such as oracle data, governance voting, etc.

On Thursday, the Interchain Foundation, a nonprofit steward of the Cosmos ecosystem, announced the release of Interchain Accounts.

The I nter-Blockchain Communications protocol (IBC) enables an entire blockchain to control an account on a separate chain. It is the largest software upgrade to the Cosmos ecosystem since Stargate. To date, there are 38 projects utilizing IBC, including Terra, Crypto.org Chain and Gravity Bridge, with 8.4 million transactions in the past 38 days.

With Interchain Accounts, one blockchain can access the application features of another blockchain, such as staking, voting, swapping tokens, etc. “Enabling composability in IBC allows innovation in distinct applications to be deployed without needing to upgrade the entire Interchain,” said Charleen Fei, IBC product lead at the Interchain Foundation.

The same day, deBridge, a cross-chain interoperability and liquidity transfer protocol, announced the launch of its mainnet. Through deBridge, users will be able to transfer assets and data between blockchain networks starting with Ethereum, BNB Chain, Heco Chain, Arbitrum, and Polygon. For example, Solana users can interact with protocols in Polygon directly from their Phantom wallets without switching wallets or networks.

Similar to Cosmos' Interchain Accounts, projects can also integrate with deBridge's infrastructure to tap into the various cross-chain opportunities the protocol enables, such as asset swaps and transfers, governance voting, farming strategies, nonfungible tokens, oracle data, and much more. DeBridge has been audited by Halborn, Zokyo, and Ackee Blockchain and maintains an ongoing bug bounty program on Immunefi.

In addition to its public mainnet, deBridge is launching its official partnerships with decentralized exchange aggregators 1inch and ParaSwap for cross-chain swaps. DeBridge uses a lock and mint approach that continuously validates the current state of the protocol and checks if the total supply of the wrapped asset is entirely backed by its collateral.

If a wrapped asset loses its peg, security monitoring can automatically pause the protocol. Validator nodes also continuously update the state of the token balances on each supported blockchain and never allow total withdrawals of an asset to exceed its total deposits.

Vitalik Buterin Skeptical of Cross-Chain Bridges

January 8, 2022 The Crypto Briefing

Vitalik Buterin gives thumbs down to cross-chain applications

January 7, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Blockchain

Ethereum's co-founder cites "fundamental security limits of bridges" as the key reason for his disapproval.

In a Reddit post on Friday, Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), outlined critical security concerns surrounding cross-chain bridges in the blockchain ecosystem. As told by Buterin, storing native assets directly-chain (Ethereum on Ethereum, Solana on Solana, etc.) provides a certain degree of immunity against 51% attacks. Even if hackers manage to censor or reverse transactions, they cannot propose blocks to take away one's crypto.

The rule also applies to the Ethereum application. For example, if hackers launch a 51% attack (by controlling 51% of all circulating ETH supply) while an investor swaps 100 ETH for 320,000 DAI stablecoin, the end state remains invariant. I.e., the investor would always get either 100 ETH or 320,000 DAI.

However, Buterin continued, that the same level of security does not apply to cross-chain bridges. In the example he raised, if an attacker deposited their own ETH onto a Solana (SOL) bridge to obtain Solana-wrapped Ether (WETH) and then reverted that transaction on the Ethereum side as soon as the Solana side confirmed it, it would incur devastating losses on other users whose tokens are locked in the SOL-WETH contract, as the wrapped tokens are no longer backed by the original on a 1:1 ratio.

Buterin further outlined how the security exploit could scale negatively as more bridges are added into a cross-chain network. In a theoretical network comprising 100 chains, the high level of interdepency and overlapping derivatives would mean that a 51% attack on one chain, especially a small-cap one, can cause a system-wide contagion. According to Crypto 51, it costs as much as $1.78 million an hour for hackers to mount a 51% attack vector against the Ethereum network. However, the cost drops to as little as $13,846 per hour for blockchains such as Bitcoin Cash.

My argument for why the future will be *multi-chain*, but it will not be *cross-chain*: there are fundamental limits to the security of bridges that hop across multiple "zones of sovereignty". From https://t.co/3g1GUvuA3A: pic.twitter.com/tEYz8vb59b
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) January 7, 2022

multi-chain