Gnosis has launched a hash oracle aggregator for blockchain bridges, as per a recent announcement from the company. Gnosis is known for its products, such as Gnosis Safe multi-sig and Gnosis Chain. Martin Koppelmann, CEO of Gnosis, indicated that the new aggregator should increase the security of bridges by requiring multiple bridges to authenticate a withdrawal before it can be validated.
According to the announcement, other bridge protocols, including Succinct Labs, DendrETH, ZK Collective, Connext, Celer, LayerZero, Axiom, Wormhole, and LI.FI has already committed to working with Hashi.
In 2021 and 2022, more than $2 billion was taken from bridges, according to a report by Token Terminal. Bugs in the code caused some bridge hacks, while others were the result of an attacker seizing control of a multi-sig governance wallet.
Martin Köppelmann, has stated that the newly launched hash oracle aggregator, Hashi, can enhance the security of cross-chain transactions in the blockchain ecosystem. According to him, Hashi requires withdrawals to be validated by multiple bridges instead of relying on just one. Köppelmann explained that Hashi functions by creating an aggregator that can utilize different bridges and ensure that they all agree on the same message. He added that if there is a disagreement among the bridges, the matter will be escalated to governance, and the bridge will be halted.
Koppelmann further underlined that Hashi helps eliminate multi-sig governance attacks since it enables a protocol to preclude governance intervention if individual bridges are in agreement.
Köppelmann explained that Hashi offers a beneficial tradeoff, where governance has limited control and cannot interfere with the system, except in cases of explicit conflict or bug. He stated that if the bridges meant to report on the same message disagree, governance is permitted to interfere. Otherwise, governance has no role to play. In essence, Hashi ensures that governance only intervenes when there is a problem with the system, thereby enhancing its overall security.
Hashi is accessible as open-source software on GitHub.
During the December and January Uniswap bridge dispute, the concept of a multi-bridge aggregator gained prominence. Despite the fact that Wormhole was finally selected as Uniswap’s bridge supplier, representatives from Celer, LiFi, and deBridge, along with other participants, determined that a multi-bridge aggregation solution must be adopted in the future.
