Summary
Ketju does not approve the Gnosis Chain bridge: signatures from 4 of 7 bridge validators are enough to execute any message, and nothing cryptographic or economic stands behind them if those signatures are forged or the validators collude. Gnosis Chain is an independent proof-of-stake EVM chain and not an Ethereum rollup. Its canonical bridge therefore does not inherit Ethereum fraud-proof or validity-proof security, as the rollup bridges Ketju reviews do. Wormhole/Portal, which Ketju does not approve, uses a 13-of-19 Guardian quorum and still lost $325M to signature forgery in 2022. The Gnosis set is much smaller. The bridge has a clean history so far, and that does not make up for so small a validator set securing an entire chain's bridge.
Review triggers
- The message-signing threshold is confirmed to require trustless verification of every message, not optional redundancy alongside trusted signers
- The bridge validator set grows materially, for example doubling, with the validators publicly named and any conflicts of interest among the Bridge Governors disclosed
- Twelve months in a row, counted from this memo's review date, with no compromise of validator signatures and no forged message
- An independent, dated audit of the current validator-signing and governance-multisig setup is published with no unresolved high-severity findings
Facts
- Verdict
- Not approved
- Type
- Other
- Chains examined
- Ethereum
- Reviewed
- Last confirmed