As the vote draws to a close, we wanted to express our appreciation for the strong show of support from the Lido DAO so far. Additionally, we wanted to take this opportunity to expand further on why we chose to collaborate on a joint solution as well as re-emphasize and clarify several aspects of our proposal.
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No Vendor Lock In: The framework we have been collaborating with Axelar on is open source, extendable, and can accommodate additional verification providers in the future. It is up to the Lido DAO on whether they would like to expand this set beyond Axelar and Wormhole in the future. Since the implementation is open source, anyone — whether that be Axelar, Wormhole, Lido contributors, LayerZero, or someone else — can build new
Endpointcontracts to use for additional verifiers. -
Commitment to ship a future-proof solution and collaborate with the DAO:
- As Jakov from the Network Expansion Workgroup (NEW) mentioned here, both Wormhole and Axelar have long histories of collaboration with the Lido DAO. As such, it is part of both Wormhole’s and Axelar’s missions to
- Improve bridging UX
- Support more chains
- Enhance token bridging security via open-source features (such as rate-limiting and accounting)
- Enhance cross-chain messaging security via future ZK verification
The opportunity to build a solution for the Lido DAO while also moving these mutual goals forward is something we are very excited about and fully committed to.
- As Jakov from the Network Expansion Workgroup (NEW) mentioned here, both Wormhole and Axelar have long histories of collaboration with the Lido DAO. As such, it is part of both Wormhole’s and Axelar’s missions to
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Battle tested: The core codebases behind the Wormhole and Axelar solution, namely the Wormhole and Axelar networks, have both been live in production for at least 2 years. Wormhole ($38B) and Axelar ($7.5B) have collectively processed more volume than any other messaging protocol, including LayerZero. LayerZero V2 is a new and untested solution launched in December 2023, which uses validation mechanisms that haven’t been running in production.
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Robust & Reliable UX: Our solution leverages Wormhole Standard Relaying and Axelar Gas Services to ensure that messages are quickly and reliably delivered from Ethereum mainnet to BNB. It can also be integrated into frontend UIs such as Wormhole Connect and Squid. It is important to note that LayerZero’s v2 messaging wrappers are not supported by Axelar nor Wormhole and do not solve a major challenge with cross-chain messaging: relaying verified messages to the destination chain. Unnecessarily adding LayerZero as an intermediary wrapper into this stack will ultimately hurt users.
We’d like to again link to the following:
- Our technical update, which includes links and in-depth details about our open source implementation.
- Our original post, which announces our partnership and covers high level details of our solution, as well as overviews of Wormhole and Axelar and our security programs
Finally, we’d like to close by addressing some key misrepresentations by LayerZero:
The claim that our design is “essentially a 2/2 multisig” is oversimplified — Wormhole and Axelar are both secured by large, decentralized, and battle tested sets of validators. 13 out of 19 Wormhole validators and 32 out of 75 Axelar validators (based on quadratic voting power of the current set) need to approve every message, resulting in strong security guarantees.
The claim that there is no plan to expand to new bridges is false and was previously addressed — the Lido DAO will have freedom to add more verification methods via Endpoint contracts in the future, especially as Wormhole and Axelar roll out ZK verification on Ethereum mainnet.
The claim that there is no plan to expand to new chains is untrue. Our solution can be used on any EVM-supported chain. That said, this vote is focused on bringing wstETH to BNB — we have correspondingly focused our proposal on that corridor.
The claim that we will not focus on audits and shipping this product in time is untrue — both Axelar team and Wormhole have done over 60 audits collectively, and run multi-million dollar bug bounties on Immunefi prioritizing theoretical and practical security.
LayerZero’s dismissal of our collaboration as “a short-term BD win for two third-party bridges” is misleading. Our partnership is a response to the community blowback towards LayerZero that we saw after their original proposal.
Our goal is to build the best solution for the Lido DAO. To accomplish that, we aim to act in good faith, bring strong technical proficiency, and uphold our industry’s strong ethos of open source, decentralization, and permissionlessness. We want to work together with the Lido DAO to build a solution that will address the community’s concerns around flexibility, security, and extensibility.