Gab.com released this statement;

“As predicted: the on ramps and off ramps (exchanges) are going to start censoring not only companies but also individuals. Coinbase has now banned both Gab’s merchant account and Andrew Torba’s account. Decentralized exchanges are the future. The next phase of financial censorship as people move to bitcoin is censoring the on ramps and off ramps (exchanges). This will force and incentivize people to not use those ramps and instead only use bitcoin for all things. Keep censoring. It will just push people to bitcoin.”

The problem for exchanges such as Coinbase which are based in the States lies in US policy which forces companies to practice suppression and censorship. This is partly why so many other exchanges and crypto companies refuse to deal with US customers.

The elegance of Cross-Chain Bridges

The Bifröst Protocol forms one of the cornerstone innovations of THORChain, and aims to solve the single biggest issue for asset transfer, interoperability between blockchains.

Bifröst is permissionless, meaning that there is no restriction on who can generate a THORChain account and trade from it.

Indeed, there is no restriction on who can enter the ecosystem via the Bifrost Protocol (cross-chain), and no limits on those assets movements.

Because of this Bifröst is the glue that holds the entire THORChain ecosystem together, enabling the seamless trading of any digital asset across any distributed ledger.

While Bifröst is not the first cross-chain solution, it could be the most evolved. In fact, THORChain’s protocol improves upon the weakness of preceding cross-chain architectures like Rootstock 2WP, Liquid Sidechain, POA Network Bridge and COSMOS Peg Zone.

How does it work in practise?

Cross-chain Bridges are simple in concept; an asset is locked on one chain; whilst an identical asset is atomically “minted” on the other and sent to an address owned by the original party.

The newly minted asset is fungible with the original one by virtue of the fact that it can be used to redeem the original asset at the same ratio that it was minted.

This newly minted asset represents the rights to unlock assets on the original chain; so as long as the bridge continues to exist without censorship or interference, then the tokenised asset can be handled as though it was the original asset.

When the owner (anyone who has keys to spend) wishes to move back to the original chain, it is done via the same bridge; the asset is destroyed on the ‘bridged’ chain and atomically unlocked on the original chain.

Summary

An asset is locked on one chain The exact amount is then minted on another chain. The assets are perfectly fungible, as they are pegged to each other, but can’t be double-spent. If the owner decides, the minted assets can revert back to their original state (and chain) and the newly minted asset will be destroyed. The original assets will be unlocked and exactly as they begun.

How are these bridges maintained?

Validators secure all transactions across the THORChain protocol by validating and relaying transactions, and by extension producing blocks.

Validators will stake their own tokens (Rune) as a representation of their self-interested responsibility to the governance of the protocol. There will be a limited number of validators, currently 100, who will be required to execute reliable multi-sig infrastructure to reach consensus.

THORChain will require protocol level slashing rules to immediately slash a validator’s stake if they attempt to spend from any of the multi-signatures without posting a valid txid first, or they spend to an incorrect user address with a valid transaction.

Summary

Bridges are not only a more elegant solution when compared to atomic swaps, but the technology and infrastructure exists now to create cross-chain fluency. Blockchains can not survive in the current fragmented state that they are in right now. This is an irrefutable fact.

When we begin to visualise different blockchains, not as seperate universes, but as isolated highways — we can begin to see how connecting protocols can just be about creating equivalency of value and not necessarily about complete compatibility of design and infrastructure.

At it’s most simple, we are looking to agree on truth of transaction with cross-chain consensus.

We propose that cross-chain bridges, with on-chain governance, is the most effective way to achieve this.

Join the Distribution

For more information or to participate in the distribution, head on over to https://thorchain.org/token.

Be sure to check out our official community channels for updates:

Github : https://github.com/thorchain

: https://github.com/thorchain Medium : https://medium.com/thorchain

: https://medium.com/thorchain Twitter : https://twitter.com/thorchain_org

: https://twitter.com/thorchain_org Reddit : https://reddit.com/r/thorchain

: https://reddit.com/r/thorchain Telegram Community : https://t.me/thorchain_org

: https://t.me/thorchain_org Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/thorchain

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