Gear Bridges

Gear Bridge is an implementation of a trustless ZK-based cross-chain bridge facilitating the transfer of assets between Ethereum and Gear-based blockchains, such as the Vara network.

Security

Caution

This code has not yet been fully audited and therefore shouldn't be used in production.

Ethernal team have performed partial audit of the code, which covered the following scope for the commit d42251c:

• prover
• plonky2 circuits for crypto primitives
• ethereum smart-contracts

Warning

One of the conclusions of this audit was that malicious node which relayer is connected to can cause the proof generation process to be halt. So all deployed relayers MUST use their own dedicated gear node which is known to be non-malicious.

High-Level Bi-Directional Gear <-> Eth Design

The Gear <-> Eth transfer protocol allows relaying messages from Gear-based blockchains to Ethereum and back. These messages consist of generic data defined by protocols built on top of the bridge. The protocol doesn't guarantee the order in which messages are relayed.

This repository contains the implementation of a token bridging protocol built on top of a more generic messaging protocol.

Components Present in Gear <-> Eth Bridge

Protocol part

• Pallet-Gear-Eth-Bridge Built-in Actor: a Built-in Actor - the entry point into the generic bridging protocol. Receives messages from any actor on the Gear network and relays them to pallet-gear-eth-bridge.
• Pallet-Gear-Eth-Bridge: Receives messages from the pallet-gear-eth-bridge built-in actor and stores them in the binary Merkle trie. This Merkle trie gets slashed at the end of each ERA. Also stores and updates hashed GRANDPA authority set.
• Gear -> Eth Relayer: Reads Gear state, generates ZK-proofs, and submits them to Ethereum. Capable of creating two types of ZK-proofs: proof of authority set changes and proof of inclusion of Merkle trie root into the storage of pallet-gear-eth-bridge. Proofs of authority set changes are intermediate and stored in on-chain proof storage while proofs of Merkle trie root inclusion are submitted to Ethereum.
• Proof Storage: Works as on-chain proof database and stores intermediate proofs generated by gear -> eth relayer.
• Relayer Contract: Accepts proofs of Merkle trie root inclusion and, if they're valid, stores Merkle trie roots in memory.
• Gnark-Verifier: A contract capable of verifying plonk proofs created by gnark. The submitted proofs are plonky2 proofs wrapped by gnark.
• Message Queue Contract: Used to recover messages from Merkle tries. A user can request a message to be relayed further onto Ethereum by providing proof of inclusion of a message actually included in the Merkle trie, given that this Merkle root was already relayed by backend (or another party). This is also the exit point of the generic Gear -> Eth bridging protocol.
• Ethereum Block client: Lazy ethereum light client that maintains sync committee validator list and is capable of verifying block headers using it.
• Eth -> Gear relayer: Relayer that monitors sync committee changes and blocks signed by it on Ethereum and updates state of ethereum block client using it.

Token transfer part

• VFT: A program capable of transferring, burning, and minting vft tokens. It repeats the implementation of the ERC20 standard on the Gear network, the standard implementation vft can be found here.
• VFT Gateway: Receives vft tokens from users, burns them, and emits a message to the pallet-gear-eth-bridge built-in actor. This message contains information about which token is being bridged, how much of it, and the recipient of funds on the Ethereum network. Also manages Eth -> Gear token transfers by verifying ethereum events using ethereum event client program.
• ERC20 Treasury: A treasury that accepts user funds and releases them. Release can only be triggered by a message relayed over the bridge from the vft gateway.
• Bridging Payment: Program on Gear and smart-contract on Ethereum that have the same functions. When bridging request is sent to them, they collect fees and relay this request to the corresponding smart-contract/program responsible of executing this request. Then some token transfer relayer can observe events signaling that request have been processed and fee is paid and process this request on the other chain, using its own funds as tx fees. Bridging payment services are fully in control of relayer that've deployed them, so to perform bridging using them one should trust the relayer that've deployed them.
• Ethereum Event client: Program on Gear that's capable of verifying that some event was included into some block. To check validity of the block it requests data from ethereum block client.
• Gear -> Eth Token Transfer Relayer and Eth -> Gear Token Transfer Relayer: These relayers hook to the events produced by bridging payment services and perform cross-chain actions to guarantee message delivery. For example, gear -> eth token transfer relayer collects bridging fees from user on Gear. When merkle root that contain this message will be relayed to Ethereum, this relayer will send transaction to the message queue contract that will trigger transfer from ERC20 treasury to the user.

Workflow of Gear -> Ethereum Token¹ Transfer

• The user submits his bridging request to frontend
• frontend submits approve call to the vft program. Approve should allow vft-gateway to spend amount of tokens that user have requested to bridge.
• frontend submits user request to the bridging-payment.
• bridging-payment takes fee and submits a message to the vft-gateway to initiate bridging.
• The vft-gateway burns vft tokens and emits a message to the pallet-gear-eth-bridge built-in actor.
• The pallet-gear-eth-bridge built-in actor relays the message to pallet-gear-eth-bridge.
• The pallet-gear-eth-bridge stores the message in a Merkle trie.
• Eventually, the relayer (or another party) relays the message to the relayer contract, and it gets stored there.
• message relayer sees that user message was relayed and submits a Merkle proof of inclusion to the message queue contract.
• The message queue contract reads the Merkle root from the relayer contract, checks the Merkle proof, and relays the message to the ERC20 treasury.
• The ERC20 treasury releases funds to the user's account on Ethereum.

Workflow of Ethereum -> Gear Token¹ Transfer

• The user submits his bridging request to frontend
• frontend submits approve call to the corresponding ERC20 contract. Approve should allow ERC20 Treasury to spend amount of tokens that user have requested to bridge.
• frontend submits user request to the ERC20 Treasury.
• The ERC20 Treasury locks ERC20 tokens on his balance and emits an event.
• Eventually, the checkpoint relayer (or another party) sumbits to checkpoint-light-client ethereum block which has block number bigger than one where event have been emitted.
• Eventually, the token transfer relayer (or another party) submits this event to ethereum-event-client
• ethereum event client send request to mint tokens to vft-gateway
• vft-gateway sends message to a vft program that corresponds to a ERC20 token that've been locked in step 4.
• vft program mints tokens to a user's address.

Build and run

Prerequisites

Install rust:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Install golang: golang installation

Install forge:

curl -L https://foundry.paradigm.xyz | bash
foundryup

Note

To build ring crate follow BUILDING.md.

Run relayer

Build workspace:

cargo build --release

And then run

cargo run --release -- --help

to see required parameters to start relayer.

Footnotes

1. Gear itself is not a blockchain network and has no native token. This refers to the token of any network built on Gear technology, such as Vara. ↩ ↩²