Vitalik Buterin, 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 is always safer to keep native Ethereum assets on Ethereum or native Solana assets on Solana to hold native Ethereum assets on Solana or native Solana assets on Ethereum.
Sharing a series of examples to demonstrate his thesis, Buterin pointed out that if a malicious entity were to attempt to launch an attack on 51% of Ethereum, a transaction made by an innocent party could be censored and/or reversed, but not blocked or lost.
In the most extreme cases, user funds would still be safe even if 99% of the protocol was compromised because the nodes would overwhelmingly support the remaining 1% of rule-following blocks and thus govern decision making. decisions.
Instead, such an incident operating on a cross-chain bridge between Ethereum and Solana, for example, would cause irreversible losses, Buterin argues. The problem is compounded by the addition of strings.
Suppose a 51% attack occurs on only one 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.”
