Giants Connect: New General-Purpose Bridge Between Polkadot and Ethereum

Polkadot is growing in popularity, and this has been thoroughly reflected in its price. In a matter of days, the project managed to occupy the 6th spot of the top 10 largest cryptocurrencies, boasting a total market cap upwards of $1.05 billion.

Now, a team of developers has announced that it’s building a trustless general-purpose bridge between Ethereum and Polkadot.

Bridging Polkadot and Ethereum

Snowfork, an agency consisting of a collection of developers, product managers, and designers, has announced that they are working on a bridge between Polkadot and Ethereum.

According to the release, the team is working with researchers and developers from the Web3 foundation.

The team’s efforts are focused on building a general-purpose and trustless bridge that will facilitate the transfer of arbitrary states across the chains through arbitrary messages that aren’t tied to a particular application. The plan is to have a bridge that makes it possible for any application to plug into and use, regardless of whether the app’s functionality is based on asset control or something else.

Additionally, the bridge is also intended to be trustless, and by targeting these two goals, the team says there are challenges to be tackled. A lot of conventional bridging concepts and protocols use trust-minimizing techniques that would only work for a basic transfer of assets.

Instead, Snowfork’s team hopes to build a set of components that can be configured to meet trust-minimization and generality-level needs for the app that decides to integrate.

Timeline of the Endeavor

The project is broken down into three different phases. Phase 1 includes abstractions, componentization, as well as proof of concept. This is where the team will implement the layered architecture and build abstract interfaces. In this phase, the team will also build the MVP bridge that will fulfill the interface designs.

In phase two, the team will aim to implement components from Substrate that would allow reading state from Ethereum in a trustless manner.

We’ll be building a SVP-like light client that runs within a Substrate module that can verify transactions from any Ethereum smart contract and so effectively allows any user to submit a message to Substrate which results in it reading state directly and trustlessly from Ethereum. – Reads the announcement.

In the last phase, the team will be reading Polkadot state trustlessly from Ethereum.

Phase one is expected to be completed in mid-September 2020, phase two in early November, and phase three by Feb/March in 2021.