We Found a Reliable Permissionless Cross-Chain Solution

So far, Endurance’s development has been handled by our small in-house tech team, specifically a tiny blockchain crew —— including me, there are three coders.

We carefully cherrypick necessary infrastructure without reinventing the wheel and wasting resources.

For example, in the previous blog, we introduced the safewallet multisig wallet, which we consider one of those “MUST-HAVE SERVICES FOR A NEW BLOCKCHAIN.” Although it comes from a company, it has become an industry standard and offers an almost permissionless deployment method, we dig it.

In terms of Endurance infrastructure, we still have two big items on our to-do list: a cross-chain¹ messaging protocol and an account abstraction wallet.

We’ve been using the ERC4337 wallet on the L2 testnet for a while and even ran a game on it to test its session key feature. It works well and isn’t going anywhere, but we need a truly compelling use case, not just a demo, to roll it out on the mainnet.

When it comes to the cross-chain messaging protocol, we’re a bit stuck. Currently, there’s no standard or de facto solution for cross-chain messaging in the industry for us to choose from. If we were a Cosmos chain, this wouldn’t be an issue —— IBC is the standard and provides everything we need. But in the EVM world, there is no IBC.

Our choices are:

• Seek help from current cross-chain giants like Wormhole or LayerZero, going through their “exams” to convince their DAOs to accept our network.
• Join forces with new competitors (often seen with terms like “intent” or “abstraction “) in a “band of underdogs” to challenge the giants above.
• Or, a permissionless cross-chain communication framework, similar to safeWallet, which we can fully manage if we’re capable enough.

Personally, I prefer the last option². Assuming the protocol/software itself has no critical bugs, the security risk would primarily be in our hands.

This is like how we built Endurance using the Ethereum protocol and clients.

And this is also like the safewallet, Your safewallet is as secure as your N/M multisig wallet’s private keys.

Similarly, the security of a cross-chain bridge would depend on how WE secure it.

Oh, sorry for my frequent use of ’like’—it’s a bad habit I’ve picked up working in web3 to help my old web2 buddies get what I’m doing.

Does such software exist? Yes, Hyperlane. Its features are no more, no less, just right for what I need:

• Deploying contracts, running validators, and relayers is permissionless.
• Security mechanisms³ can be dynamically configured at runtime. The minimum security level can be quite low, but the maximum can be very high, depending on how secure you want a specific route to be.

It’s more like a framework, an SDK, a public good. The rest is up to you to control⁴.

I’m not sure if there are other similar options (if there are, please let me know). But based on my recent interactions with them, I feel that they are a group of guys who really know what they want to do. Let’s spend more time cooking with them.

So, thanks to Hyperlane, we finally found a reliable permissionless cross-chain solution. And you’ll see its first route in the near future.

PS: If you’re a developer and want to try deploying a hyperlane route, you can check out the next blog written by my buddy @lyfsn.