Paper 2024/995

Cross-chain bridges via backwards-compatible SNARKs

Sergio Juárez
Mark Blunden
Joris Koopman
Anish Mohammed
Kapil Shenvi Pause
Steve Thakur
Abstract

In recent years, SNARKs have shown great promise as a tool for building trustless bridges to connect the heterogeneous ecosystem of blockchains. Unfortunately, the parameters hardwired for many of the widely used blockchains are incongruous with the conventional SNARKs, which results in unsatisfactory performance. This bottleneck necessitates new proof systems tailored for efficiency in these environments. The primary focus of this paper is on succinct bridges from Cosmos to Ethereum, which largely boils down to efficient proofs of multiple Ed25519 signatures. However, these techniques can be ported to settings that require succinct proofs of multiple secp256k1 or BLS12-381 signatures. We describe our succinct validity bridging scheme Overfly, which uses a field-agnostic SNARK to circumvent the huge overhead of non-native field arithmetic arising from Ed25519 scalar multiplications in the circuit. We also explore the schemes deVirgo and zkTree, which exploit the parallelization of proof generation and the subsequent aggregation of proofs. Our benchmarks indicate that it is crucial to sidestep non-native arithmetic to the extent that it is possible. We also found that two or more proof systems need to be securely amalgamated to optimize a succinct validity bridging scheme.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
bridgeKZGparallelizationaggregationsuccinctvaliditynon-native arithmetic
Contact author(s)
sergiomjv @ gmail com
mark blunden @ pantherprotocol io
joriskoopman123 @ gmail com
anish @ pantherprotocol io
kapilpause007 @ gmail com
stevethakur01 @ gmail com
History
2024-06-21: revised
2024-06-20: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2024/995
License
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
CC BY-SA

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2024/995,
      author = {Sergio Juárez and Mark Blunden and Joris Koopman and Anish Mohammed and Kapil Shenvi Pause and Steve Thakur},
      title = {Cross-chain bridges via backwards-compatible {SNARKs}},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2024/995},
      year = {2024},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/995}
}
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