[REDACTED] 2024 | Omnibridge: How it Actually Works

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1. 0:05

   hey everyone uh today I want to uh talk a bit more about uh a concept that was introduced in maybe many different talks yesterday uh probably heard of this uh bus word called uh Omni Bridge being mentioned uh number of times uh and here I just want to do um somewhat technical Deep dive on housing's uh work and uh why it would be useful okay so what are some of the problem with Bridges today um I mean to be fair one of the problem is there are

2. 0:39

   too many of them uh but more realistically um it's often times not very easy to use uh as developer need to understand well there's new bridge and some some new API that I need to integrate with um and so on and so forth and also it doesn't um most of the bridges don't actually support uh non-smart contract chains and and usually how it works is that uh there may be some simar contract um

3. 1:02

   on the different chains and then you can prove things about other chain uh with the um uh with the bridge uh but for nons smart contract chains uh sometimes that doesn't work very well so uh what Omni Bridge uh wants to do is that wants to provide a unified interface that developers can can easily integrate with and um and make great experience for the users as a result and we also want to make sure that it can uh work well with uh non-smart contract chains so most notably

4. 1:36

   Bitcoin so this is uh kind of a overview of what the the interface looks like uh I think um the I would say the most important part here is uh this Omni transfer which is um so this what what is sh here is basically this client side as decay right so it's not um uh it's not smart contract so on basically uh on this CR so domni Bridge uh we don't actually introduce any uh new standard per se that's on chain rather you as

5. 2:08

   developer you can just um uh use this SDK and and and do Omni transfer and it can basically take uh a variety of uh chains or like um accounts and different chains as parameters and also in this transfer message basically to say okay here is my uh account on on some chain and I want to transfer to another chain and this is amount I I want to transfer and this is amount of fee I want to pay uh for this transfer and um it basically would just automatically work you can just call this well obviously you need

6. 2:41

   to wait uh for a bit right because as we know bridge is not uh instantaneous uh it's asynchronous operation but you just you know call it and and wait and then magically will be down uh so looking at uh example more concretely so let's say you want to transfer from east to to base uh and then what you basically just do is that you obvious get your wallet and then you say like okay here is the the address I

7. 3:06

   have and here is how how much tokens I want to transfer and the the recipient address and also the fee I want to pay uh to for this transfer to happen and then just call Omni transfer uh and it's done uh so it's basically a very uh hopefully very easy to understand and very easy to use interface um for developers uh so that we can provide a simless experience for users to move

8. 3:31

   their assets across different chains now obviously there's question well how does actually work uh so there are too too much taex here but basically I just want to give example of how you trans how you move assets from let's say near to ethereum and also move from to near uh so the important thing to note here is that they are not uh asymmetric uh sorry they're not symmetric meaning that the way you do transfer from near

9. 3:54

   to uh destination chain is not the same as you do from destination chain to near um so so basically from near to to eum for example it STS through change signatures basically there's token Locker contract on near has a corresponding derivation address onum so that they can sign eum transactions uh what What's what it actually signs is not the eum transaction per se but but it gets verified on ser and then uh the the contract there can um mean the corresponding tokens uh in the erc20

10. 4:25

    contract and and conversely when you want to bridge from AUM to near uh what you're doing is actually doing uh light crry proof uh so this is similar to uh what what we already have for rainow bridge uh so it's the similar concept and uh for Bitcoins um yeah it's basically the the same thing that uh the way we support Bitcoin is that the the contract on near will have a derivation address on bitcoin that people can deposit into um and um and then proof

11. 4:55

    can can be verified um then on near corresponding tokens get minted and if one withdraw to bitcoin then uh because contract has address on bitcoin then it can sign a transaction uh that's that's going to get executed on bitcoin uh obviously it's not going to be very fast um but um uh well that's just the withdraw on bitcoin that you have to deal with uh so yeah here um the as as I I was working through the example in um

12. 5:24

    AUM and and Bitcoin I think this a asymmetry is manifested in the uh uh two important components on that underpins Omni Bridge uh one is called chain signatures you many of you probably familiar with uh it's this uh ability uh well the chain signatures allow near near smart contracts to have derivation addresses on uh many other different blockchains and as a result they can actually sign transactions uh on other blockchains so that uh the the withdrawal is basically you this smart contract actually sign the transaction

13. 5:59

    that can get executed on other chains um so that it's kind of a a bridging was not an actual bridge and um uh because it's all all Native to other chains and and on in the other direction uh we we we basically create this abstraction called Omni prover uh it this uh abstraction that uh can prove uh transactions on near uh can prove transactions on other chains uh on near so that we can be convinced so smart contracts on can be convinced of

14. 6:31

    transactions that happen on other chains now obviously there are are many many different ways you can can can do this uh so that's why it is an abstraction um actually depending on the chain that that that that we use uh that we interact with uh the the actual prover is different uh so this is kind of like a router uh let's say um Ser proofs comes in it would um know from the the address that is transaction and then it

15. 6:55

    route to this is light client that can verify the uh the transaction uh verify the proof uh that some transaction has happened on etherum and similarly with Bitcoin there's Bitcoin liteco that would verify uh the the transaction um but you know light cin is not always uh feasible to implement or not always the uh the most convenient thing to implement uh if we want to support many many different chains uh so the obn

16. 7:19

    approver also integrates with other uh message passing protocols like Wormhole uh that would also provide uh this uh this proofs for uh different different block CH and finally a important piece here is uh the the relayer right because uh what we talked about so far are just mostly about smart contracts and smart contracts they cannot act uh autonomously so right you you actually

17. 7:43

    need uh someone to submit the prooves and and Trigger the execution on the other side uh to actually finish uh this moving of assets and um uh the relayer is is used to do that and the important thing here is that uh anyone can wrun a relayer completely trustless it doesn't introduce uh any point of uh centralization um and also in the um if we if we go back uh in the in the API there is actually a fee that you can uh specify to pay for the relayer uh so

18. 8:15

    that uh it's it's not uh uh so that relays are incentivized uh to work uh and um um that obviously is a is you know great uh kind of technical ideas uh but we also are working very hard on bringing them to reality uh we are you know we want to support more and more chains in the future but there are initial set of chains that we want to support uh that'll be near Bitcoin eum salana base and arbitrum uh and we hope

19. 8:46

    to launch that uh in q1 2025 and then as developers you can uh build on top of that um make it very easy for people to move uh assets uh especially funable tokens uh across those chains um with no hurdles yeah that's a a quick overview of how Omni Bridge works and um yeah thanks San for listening