Gnosis launches Hashi bridge aggregator to help prevent hacks

Gnosis, the team behind Gnosis Safe multi-sig and Gnosis Chain, has launched a hash oracle aggregator for blockchain bridges, according to a company announcement. In a conversation with Cointelegraph, Gnosis CEO Martin Köppelmann stated that the new aggregator should make bridging more secure by requiring more than one bridge to validate a withdrawal before it can be confirmed.

Several bridge protocols have already committed to integrating with Hashi, including Succinct Labs, DendrETH, ZK Collective, Connext, Celer, LayerZero, Axiom, Wormhole, and LI.FI, according to the announcement.

More than $2 billion was stolen of bridges in 2021 and 2022, according to a report by Token Terminal. Bugs in the code have caused some bridge attacks, while others have been caused by the attacker taking over a multi-sig government wallet.

According to Köppelmann, Hashi can provide the first step in making these cross-chain transactions more secure across the entire blockchain ecosystem, by requiring withdrawals to be validated by multiple bridges instead of just one:

Hashi is essentially about creating this aggregator that can use different bridges and basically say that everyone should accept the same message. [...] If they do, great, then we can be very, very sure that this message is actually real and if they don't agree [...] So we know that we must escalate to governance, we must stop the bridge.

Köppelmann also emphasized that Hashi helps prevent multisig governance attacks because it allows a protocol to prevent governance from intervening if there is no disagreement between individual bridges.

“Here you can have this nice trade-off where you say 'the government can't do anything,' so they can't interfere with the system unless there's an explicit conflict or error,” he explained. "So as soon as those bridges that are supposed to report the same thing [...] I disagree, well then governance is allowed to interfere, otherwise governance has no role. That's Hashi.

Related: Uniswap's BNB rollout should use multiple bridges, LIFI CEO claims

Hashi is open source and available on GitHub.

The idea of ​​a multi-bridge aggregator rose to prominence during the Uniswap bridge debate in December and January. Although Wormhole was finally chosen As Uniswap's bridge provider, representatives from Celer, LiFi, and deBridge, as well as other participants, concluded that a multi-bridge aggregation solution needed to be implemented in the future.