Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum, shared a candid assessment of the security limitations in implementing fully functional cross-chain bridges within the blockchain industry.
Buterin argued that storing assets on their native chain provides a higher level of security against 51% attacks than cross-chain activities, stating, “It’s always safer to hold Ethereum-native assets on Ethereum or Solana-native assets on Solana than it is to hold Ethereum-native assets on Solana or Solana-native assets on Ethereum.”
Sharing a series of examples to prove his thesis, Buterin noted that if a malicious entity attempted to launch a 51% attack on Ethereum, a transaction undertaken by an innocent party could be censored and/or reverted, but not blocked and not lost.
In the most extreme cases, users’ funds would remain safe even if 99% of the protocol was compromised because nodes would overwhelmingly support the remaining 1% rule-following blocks and, therefore, govern the decision-making.
In contrast, an incident of this kind operating on a cross-chain bridge between Ethereum and Solana, for example, would result in irreversible losses, Buterin argues. The problem compounds with the addition of chains.
Let’s suppose a 51% attack occurs on a single of 50 chains. In that case, all of them become vulnerable in what he describes as a “systemic contagion that threatens the economy of that entire ecosystem.”
Proof-of-stake blockchain Near Protocol raised $150 million in seed investment this week to enhance the awareness and adoption of Web3 applications within its network, with an inherent focus on expanding its audience and community base to the regions of Latin America, Turkey and India.
The capital raise was led by renowned hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and was further participated by Mechanism Capital, Dragonfly Capital and Andreessen Horowitz’s Silicon Valley-based fund a16z. Individual angel investors included British billionaire hedge fund manager Alan Howard and Aave founder Stani Kulechov.
In a Medium blog post, Near Foundation CEO Marieke Flament shared her optimism on the latest funding, around which succeeds the previous total of $65.9 million raised by the company:
“We are delighted to have such a fantastic list of backers supporting NEAR’s mission. We are looking forward to leveraging the funding to improve access to blockchain technology in an ever-growing list of countries across the world.”
In October 2021, the smart contract platform allocated $800 million for new initiatives within the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, such as developer applications, startup grants and geographical fund pots.