Prioritize Building out a Wormhole Integration

[cwgoes]

Thanks for the considered responses @preto and @Rigorous. I wanted to share a few thoughts, and I have a few questions.

Thoughts

@preto

I feel we need to be more responsible with ensuring safety than what I (maybe mis) read from this. I believe most end-users neither should have nor necessarily have the technical capabilities to make these assessments, and thus safety above all should be a big priority here from protocol side imo. (I might be overinterpreting you here @cwgoes)

My statement was brief, to expand a bit on my current position (happy to hear disagreements):

1. Namada should not support assets or connect to things that are obvious scams (this doesn’t apply to any bridge we might reasonably consider here, but it would have applied e.g. to Terra/USDT, at least given the benefit of hindsight).
2. Otherwise, Namada should be pretty liberal in connecting to chains and assets – not every user wants to use every asset or chain, but the more users using the MASP, the more privacy for everyone. At the protocol level, we should use IBC rate limits and/or similar circuit breakers (as is already done) to bound the risk should something go wrong.
3. We should aim to help users understand what trust assumptions they’re making and what risks they’re exposed to. Typically, this would happen at the interface (e.g. Namadillo) level, with warnings, safety tips, “advanced mode”, links to external analyses, etc. The choices are ultimately always up to the user, but we should inform them as best we can (in a neutral fashion).

Would you generally be in agreement with that, or do you have a different take?

@preto

I understand from discord that there is already now a signalling proposal on-chain for this. I think this is rushed.

While I realize we have no formal procedures for governance proposal process yet (I think this may motivate me to finalize and put forward some stuff I shared with some of you a while back), I think we should have longer discussion periods before putting a signaling vote on something of this magnitude. I don’t mean to be super conservative, but I feel this is slightly rushed, particularly given some cautious voices have been raised to this.

That’s fair, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ve been cooking up. Wormhole was mentioned before, and didn’t seem to generate any controversy then, but perhaps this was not very visible. On the other hand, from the Heliax side, we have development resources available (not everything can be used to speed up phase 4/5), and we’d like to get started on something – and I don’t think it’s in the community’s interest for us to spin our wheels idling either. Speed matters, especially in the current environment, whether we like it or not. However, I think that these goals should be able to be synthesized with thoughtfully designed process – perhaps a kind of signaling vote that is more specifically “exploratory”, for example – but I’ll hold off on brainstorming there until you share what you’ve been working on! Another process that I imagine would be helpful is a way to surface general community sentiment around immediate priorities (prior to signalling votes) that Heliax or other entities could use as a signal to inform how they focus their time.

@Rigorous

Ideally trust-minimized platforms are used such as Union, but those are not fully crystallized and battle-tested yet. I guess we have to use the platforms that are actually functional as a stopgap solution or do you see Wormhole as a permanent integration?

I’m also excited about Union, and I think that we’ll definitely want to support different bridges in the future – ultimately, it’s up to what users want to use (and they, in turn, will care about which options are the safest, cheapest, and easiest, I expect).

Questions

@preto

My understanding is Stargate (Layer0 flagship) did 3.5 B last month, though admittedly hard comparatives are hard to come by

Do you have a good data source for this? I looked quickly on DefiLlama but it wasn’t super clear.

@preto

I also note in this connection that as I mentioned in the discord a few times, polaris seems to me to bring a lot of what we need, and seeing as we “come from” the same ecosystem, it might be a more obvious candidate for first choice.

Is Polaris a bridge? I thought it was a multichain DEX UI. Do you mean this Polaris, or another one?