Interpretation of Trust Minimization Middleware by Distributed Capital Researcher: Consensus Verification and Bridging

Distributed Capital researcher's view on Trust Minimization Middleware: verifying consensus and bridging.

Researcher BallsyAlchemist from Distributed Capital wrote an article analyzing the meaning of trust minimization, why zkBridge has not yet implemented trust minimization, and how to achieve complete consensus verification through ZK light clients.

Succinct, Celer Network, Polymer Labs, LayerZero Labs, and Wormhole have all built zkBridges in different ways, but they have different views on interoperability. For example, Succinct, Celer, and Wormhole rely on ZK light client consensus proof to verify the consensus of origin chain A on destination chain B, while Polymer tries to establish a zkIBC center to achieve a similar IBC experience on any chain. However, most of the security assumptions of zkBridge are based on light clients, which means that the security of zkBridge is equivalent to that of light clients, but far less than L1 security.

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How secure is a light client based on synchronous committees? I think synchronous committees are not secure for several reasons: 1) validator distribution bias among node operators: if a node operator is running validators A, B, C, and D, and finds that A is compromised, the probability of collusion between B, C, and D will increase, so it is not independent or uniformly distributed; 2) coordination risk without time limit: 27 hours is long enough for synchronous validators to collude; 3) lack of replicability of consensus =>N security is not high.

So how do we solve this problem? My suggestion is to perform full consensus verification by verifying every signature of all validators, and with the abstract of on-chain verification of BLS signatures by ZKP, we can establish a ZK light client that truly executes complete consensus verification in a trust-minimized manner. In addition, there are three possible methods to effectively generate consensus proof for about 600,000 validator signatures, including recursive composition method, commitment-based method, and folding-based method.

Reference: https://twitter.com/ballsyalchemist/status/1664270746506637312

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