icRouter

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Inspiration

In the crypto ecosystem its commonly understood that centralized components pose a risk to the network or application they're associated with due to the imperfect and unpredictable nature of the people these components have to rely on. Cross-chain bridges in particular have struggled to come up with fully decentralized solutions. As a result in the past two years a large number of cross-chain bridges have been attacked due to centralized node issues, resulting in billions of dollars in losses. Therefore, based on the above problem, we think that we can develop an application based on the IC protocol layer to provide asset cross-chain function through the ECDSA technology of IC network.

What it does

icRouter is a cross-chain network of assets based on threshold signature technology, with no off-chain bridges, supporting Bitcoin, IC, and EVM networks (e.g., Ethereum). The goal of the project is to implement a cross-chain network that enables the transfer of mainstream public chain assets to each other, supporting Bitcoin, Ethereum, IC, Polygon, Optimism, BNB Chain, and more. It is an all-in-one solution that supports most integrations of IC's chain-key technology, including ckBTC and ckETH, which is being developed by the Dfinity Foundation. We use the IC network for information routing and asset routing to achieve bridgeless asset cross-chaining.

How we built it

icRouter has two main contract implementations, Minter.mo and Token.mo. To enable external assets to cross into the IC network, you need to deposit the external assets to the specified address, Minter will get the user's deposit status through the Https Outcall, and when it confirms that the user has deposited the assets successfully, the corresponding assets will be minted in the IC network with the same value. The security of the whole process is based on the protocol layer of the IC network and does not involve the participation of centralized networks.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges were encountered as we considered how to resist scrutiny. We ended up taking the following two measures to safeguard data accuracy as well as transparency

1. Establish decentralized RPC Multipoint Data Consensus.
2. Establish full data transparency and provide a block explorer
   • icRouter will record all transactions during the cross-chain process and establish correspondences between IC network accounts and other network accounts, and this data will be publicly monitored.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

icRouter provides a more secure cross-chain solution with benefits for the entire ecosystem. The completion of the project will introduce access to a wide range of assets in the crypto ecosystem to the IC which in turn will help to facilitate the development of the IC's Defi ecosystem. Opening the door for these assets, especially stablecoins such as UCDT and USDC, to the IC ecosystem will likely bring new users, increased TVLs, and an uptick in overall usage of the IC.

What's next for icRouter

We will be upgrading ic.house to show all the transactions that will be made during the cross-chain process and the correspondence between IC network accounts and other network accounts.

Built With

• motoko