I’ve been asking myself why has it taken me so long to write this? Ultimately I still carry a huge amount of cognitive dissonance here. In my mind LayerZero the protocol was like Gnosis Safe and the application was setting their config, and who the )@(!$ would secure billions in TVL on a 1/1? I even tweeted about it, literally 0, I would have bet almost anything on that because almost every major application we helped setup their configs. Someone then going and manually changing that to a 1/1 was outside of the realm of possibility for me.
I was wrong.
It’s easy to sit back and say ‘it’s just a protocol we have no control over how people use it’ but we have the opportunity to be better.
There was a conversation this week speaking to a customer and they just… screamed at me, at the top of their lungs, and swore for a solid ~3-5 minutes straight. We had implemented additional security measures of forcing a more stringent RPC quorum and forcing every chain to provide multiple RPCs and we had done it without telling them and it !)@$d with their business, which frankly is a deadly sin. We had messed with their business and they said communication wise we were completely blowing this. They were completely right.
This is something I care about a ton, it is both the result of a huge portion of my life and something that I fundamentally believe in. I literally gifted a copy of Unreasonable Hospitality to every single manager in the company. The entire point of what we’ve built is to enable others to build on top of it, it is to provide a protocol and a platform for people to build on, and we’ve been failing some of our largest customers.
The past two weeks have been unbelievably miserable. I’m incredibly grateful for all of the applications who have worked with us over the past 2 weeks, for @zeroshadow_io who has spent endless cycles with us tracking and seizing millions in attacker funds which will be returned to the rsETH team, and for all of the parties who brought together DefiUnited. Particularly @aave for leading and @MikeSilagadze for pushing everyone to get their !@)($ together and sort things out as quickly as possible, and putting himself in the frontline of acquisition talks and everything else to try to get to a solution quickly.
@LayerZero_Core is one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure in the industry, the LayerZero protocol has earned the trust of the largest and most important asset issuers in the space. We will do better and we will make the industry better for it.
My entire focus over the past 2 weeks has singularly been working with applications to harden their setup, building tooling to assist in tracking and freezing hacker funds, and the rsETH recovery efforts.
That is going to shift now to where LayerZero Labs spends it's time and effort. The only thing this company will spend time on is how we can better serve our asset issuers and the upcoming launch of Zero.
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Absolutely shocking that a competitor would put out a wildly dishonest post about us. Happy to have @zellic_io@osec_io@ZOKYO_io or any other of the auditing firms come comment and dispel but let me summarize.
If you set up your own config, absolutely none of this is true
All of this is in reference to using the "defaults" on LayerZero. These are made for teams who aren't prioritizing security but want to spin up something and test it, make it work, and have it out in the wild. In this case you're "defaulting" to the current VL, Oracle, Relayer
Every application who does care -- should select things things themselves and then there is literally nothing that anybody can ever do to impact this. None of these are bugs or critical vulnerabilities, this is exactly how the system is built and how it's meant to function
I'm going to spend some time highlighting a couple of groups here, not because I think any investor plays a more important role than any others but more because we worked incredibly hard to get together a group that is extremely unique. This is not your normal round in crypto
Ok time to discuss the ∆ (Delta) algorithm, brainchild of @ryanzarick and the underlying core (along with @LayerZero_Labs) that makes Stargate so powerful
So I'm going to skip the large benefits of Stargate (you can read about them here medium.com/stargate-offic…) and focus on how it actually works from a high level and what the implications are
So if you've played around with Stargate so far you've probably seen that every action takes exactly 1 transaction. Want to transfer USDC from Arbitrum to Avalanche? 1 tx. Add liquidity and have it be tied to & collect fees from all connected chains?. 1 tx
This means that not only is it a shared token standard across all chains but it can be seamlessly bridged across all chains with exactly 0 fee (it's transferred at the token level)
With @LayerZero_Labs guarantee of valid delivery the token is burned on the source chain and minted on the destination chain directly through the token contract.
24 people. 13 months of work. The entire team uprooting themselves to move to the Bahamas. Countless hours, weekends, and personal sacrifices all culminating now. We’re dropping a LOT today, I’ll try to lay it all out below [thread]
First, and most important. The LayerZero network is now live (in beta) on 7 chains: Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, BNB Chain, Fantom, Aribtrum, Optimism.
Live means endpoints are available on all chains. any contract can deploy and interact with them, and seamlessly send messages to any other connected chain.
I know asking you to watch a 10 minute video is an act of aggression, but if you are interested in cross-chain / interop take the time for this one. First time we demo @LayerZero_Labs in the wild
A few important things to note about the video
We chose to show DEX -> bridge -> DEX but this can be any arbitrary contracts across any chains. The design space is near limitless.
want to unstake your farm on Ethereum and stake it onto @avalancheavax in a single tx on ETH? done
Want to cast votes from @arbitrum or @0xPolygon without needing to swap or move all of your assets to another chain where governance lives? done
want to collateralize on one chain and borrow on another? done