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Refusal file · other

Why Ketju rejected xDAI Stake Bridge (Gnosis Chain)

Memo v1Published by Ketju Research

A registry memo, published verbatim and versioned. Superseded versions are recorded, never edited away. A rejection is a judgment for Ketju's client base and thesis, not a universal safety claim. Not investment, legal, tax, or compliance advice.

The memo

REJECTED ON A THIN VALIDATOR SET, A STANDING STRUCTURAL FACT. Gnosis Chain is an independent proof-of-stake EVM chain, not an Ethereum rollup, so its canonical bridge does not inherit Ethereum-native fraud-proof or validity-proof security the way every rollup bridge in this registry does. Instead, message execution requires signatures from only 4 of 7 bridge validators — a materially smaller trust set than the already-rejected Wormhole/Portal's 13-of-19 Guardian quorum, which suffered a $325M signature-forgery loss in 2022. A clean incident record to date does not offset a validator set this small securing an entire independent chain's bridge with no cryptographic or economic backstop if those signatures were ever forged or colluded.

What would reopen the file

  • The message-signing threshold is confirmed to require mandatory trustless verification for every message, not optional redundancy alongside trusted signers
  • The bridge validator set expands materially, for example doubling, with full public disclosure of validator identities and any conflicts of interest among the Bridge Governors
  • Twelve consecutive months with no validator-signature compromise or forged-message incident, counted from this review's date
  • An independent, dated audit of the current validator-signing and governance-multisig configuration is published with no unresolved high-severity findings

Facts on file

Verdict
Rejected
Exposure
other
Chains examined
Ethereum
Memo version
v1
Reviewed
Next review

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