Summary

A proposal to whitelist Connext, a trust minimized cross chain protocol, for V3 Portals on 6 chains: Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, Avalanche, Fantom, Harmony - with credit lines for USDC ($2m on each chain), USDT ($1m on each chain) and ETH (40 ETH on each chain).

Reasonale

Connext is a network for fast, trustless communication between chains and rollups. It is the only interoperability system of its type that does this cheaply and quickly without introducing any new trust assumptions. Connext is aimed at developers who are looking to build bridges and other natively cross-chain applications. To date, over $1.3b in transactions have crossed the network.

Our network of liquidity providers only works with native assets, or the most canonical representation of a wrapped asset.

With our Amarok upgrade, a series of improvements are coming for users, developers and liquidity providers (routers): the latest will be tasked with providing capital upfront to the users, while getting refunded within 30 minutes when the slower confirmation, coming from the Optimistic communication protocol Nomad, is completed.

Users’ transactions get confirmed in seconds, LPs get rewarded with a fee on the transaction for their service.

Portals are therefore a perfect match for Connext as our LPs will need and want to access immediate extra liquidity to fulfill transactions, and our new architecture allows for this operation to be completed via the protocol in a trust minimized way.

Technical Specifications

Connext is much more than a bridge, it’s an interoperability protocol: it allows to build cross chain applications without adding trust assumptions. One of these applications are bridges, others could be cross chain NFTs marketplaces or cross chain governance portals.

51 routers are currently providing $40m+ of liquidity. The highly capital efficient architecture of Connext allows for higher volume (and therefore higher returns) with less capital compared to other solutions in the space. The system is currently working on a whitelist basis. Once the NEXT token is live, the whole network will be permissionless.

How does it work?

This is an overview of the Amarok architecture that is currently on testnet and planned to go live in a few weeks:

The new flow heavily utilizes Nomad (and eventually other localized messaging layers) for its security model. Routers front capital and execute calls for a user’s transaction, and claim against funds going through Nomad.

A full overview can be found here.

This model fits with the Aave Portals. This is how the simplified architecture integrating Portals will look like - credits to Delphi Digital for the image.

(Development progress deep dive).

The logic for the execute and reconcile methods for the Aave portals has been completed and is ready for audit.

Is there a fee model for participants?

LPs currently take a 5bps fee from every transaction

Analytics dashboard of Connext: https://connextscan.io

Bridge for users: https://bridge.connext.network

Technical documentation: https://docs.connext.network

Proposed list Credit Line request

The credit lines are requested for the following networks where both Connext and Aave are already present.

Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, Avalanche, Fantom, Harmony

Note: Routers providers are charging 5 bps to complete cross chain transactions. All outstanding loans are repaid within 60 min (avg 30 min), effectively paying a high interest rate: 0.005% / 60 min → 44% APR

Incentives

A Liquidity Mining program might be approved by the DAO once the NEXT token goes live.

Audits & Security

List of relevant security audits of the network

• NXTP Audit
• Amarok Audit will be published as soon as it’s available

Has the Entity experienced outages, downtime, or exploits/hacks?

No

Voting

FOR:

DO Approve Credit lines for Connext

AGAINST:

DO NOT Approve Credit lines for Connext