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Multibridge Version 3.0

In February 2023, we've upgraded to version 3.0 of the Multi-Chain NFT Bridge. Incrementing the major version in semantic versioning means improvements so fundamental that it feels like a brand-new product.

Token bridges and exchanges have been attacked since 2014 when $460M was stolen from "Mt. Gox". Very often, smart contracts are used to hack a vulnerable contract and extract tokens to an account controlled by criminals. Therefore, among other preventive measures, we implemented contract whitelisting. It behaves like a WEB3 Firewall, letting only verified and trusted contracts interact with the bridge.

However, everything comes at a cost. Contract whitelisting was slow and unscalable. XP.NETWORK team members had to manually find the source code of a contract in a chan explorer and read line after line, looking for potential malicious logic. Now we automated the process and tested it on thousands of contracts.

Another time-consuming process was contract deployment on the chains of destination. XP.NETWORK team had to collect all the original contract credentials, ask the collection creators whether they wish any additional logic on the chain of destination, then populate all the values in the contract constructor and deploy it. Every time humans are involved, errors may occur, making contracts behave unexpectedly. Fortunately, with the third version, so much human intervention is no longer required. After contract deployment it had to be mapped with the original contract telling the bridge where NFTs must be minted or locked.

Breaking Changes

  1. Automated NFT contracts scanning for potentially malicious code that could harm the bridge or its users. Like WEB2 antiviruses scan software for malware, so does XP.NETWORK Bridge starting from version 3.0.
  2. Automated contract whitelisting - after a contract's source code has been verified by the Automated malware scanner, its address is added to the list of trusted, allowing the bridge to interact with it.
  3. Automated Target Contract Deployment - If a destination contract does not exist, the bridge can automatically deploy it. Besides, the bridge automatically maps the original and the destination contracts piping the tokens to flow from one to another.

Upgradable example

How will the users benefit

After introducing the third version of the bridge, any NFT owner can bridge without waiting for the NFT collection team to contact XP.NETWORK team. All the preparatory work can be done in minutes without team member intervention.

Once you find a contract of your interest is not whitelisted, you can click the button. The source code of the contract will be scanned, and if found trustworthy, it will be whitelisted within minutes after clicking.

Automatic contract deployment is also available for anyone to launch. If you want to bridge an NFT and it does not have a mirror contract on the receiving chain, you can open the deployment panel and deploy a target smart contract yourself.

More details about the new version can be found in the following documents of the present section. Stay tuned.