zkBridge NEP-7: Integrate Unichain with Polyhedra Network

Category: Technical Proposal

I. Proposal

This is a proposal to integrate the following project with zkBridge.

Project Name: Unichain

Reasons for integration:

• Cross-chain liquidity. Unichain is built to support seamless transactions across dozens of chains, making it easy to access liquidity no matter what chain users are on. Unichain native interoperability will be gradually rolled out in coordination with Optimism rolling out interoperability for the Superchain.
• Cheaper execution. Unichain has lower costs for creating and accessing liquidity, with transaction fees 20x lower than Ethereum. Unichain is designed to leverage and accelerate Ethereum’s scaling roadmap, moving execution to an L2. This lowers transaction costs by ~95% in the short term, and even more over time. While Unichain relies on a single sequencer for efficiency, it introduces further decentralization by allowing full nodes to help verify blocks.
• Interoperability. With a focus on interoperability, there is an opportunity for Polyhedra Network to contribute meaningfully by offering a trust-minimized zero-knowledge secured interoperability solution.
• Community. Uniswap’s robust community would be additive to the Polyhedra community and vice versa.

Description: Unichain is a DeFi-native Ethereum L2, optimized to be the home for liquidity across chains. Designed for DeFi and powered by Uniswap, Unichain is built to scale Ethereum. The Uniswap Labs team is Unichain’s primary technical provider, and has built the world’s largest decentralized trading protocol, with over $2T in trading volume and 465M+ trades.

Project’s Social Media: Website: https://www.unichain.org/ Twitter: https://x.com/unichain Discord: https://discord.com/invite/uniswap Whitepaper: https://docs.unichain.org/whitepaper.pdf

II. Rationale

zkBridge provides users with a range of options for greater asset diversity, via bridging between various L1s and L2s. By connecting the supported blockchains and continually adding valuable ecosystem members, this allows more users worldwide to be able to benefit from the functionalities and features of Polyhedra Network. Furthermore, strategic partnerships foster growth and development for the ecosystem and its participants.

Candidates for future integrations will be selected by the community. Based on feedback received from ecosystem members, multiple criteria are considered, including:

• Global reach, recognition from major industry players, and community interest
• Adherence to regulatory standards and prioritization of security
• Focus on, or incorporation of, zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs)
• Potential for enhancing the network functionality, applications, and user interactions to set a new standard for secure, efficient, and user-friendly cross-chain transactions
• Potential to encourage greater ecosystem participation and collaboration
• Increased flexibility, decentralization, an/or system integrity across networks

III. Abstract

Polyhedra Network’s zkBridge represents a significant advancement in the blockchain industry, offering a trustless, efficient, and secure interoperability protocol across different Layer-1 and Layer-2 networks. Polyhedra currently supports integration of zkBridge with a number of third party blockchains and ecosystems such as AltLayer, Alchemy Bridge, Arbitrum, and more. Central to the zkBridge security model is the integration of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), which offer robust security that is not dependent on external factors and significantly reduces the complexities and costs associated with on-chain verification. Other assets may be supported and utilized to grow the utility of the network.

IV. Additional Context

zkBridge uses zkSNARKs to enable a prover to convince the receiver chain that a certain state transition happened on the sender chain. zkBridge consists of a block header relay network and an updater contract, and uses a 2-layer recursive proof system to achieve fast proof generation. This keeps on-chain proof verification costs low, without sacrificing performance, in order to support cross-chain applications and users. As of June 2024, zkBridge has supported more than 30 layer-1 and layer-2 networks, and has successfully verified more than 20 million cross-chain transactions.

V. Threshold to Approve

A. More than 50,000 of total staking power (SP) cast as votes, and B. More “Yes” votes than “No” votes