Across Protocol is now live on mainnet. Across is the fastest, cheapest and most secure L2 to L1 bridge. Any potential Across token will be distributed in the fairest possible way: you decide who gets it, and how it works. We are calling this a “fair fair launch.”
The Bridge is Open
Across has been audited by OpenZeppelin, and in a closed beta has been less expensive and faster than any other solution on the market. As of today it is possible to bridge USDC, ETH, and UMA from Arbitrum back to L1 Ethereum. Try Across.to now. The bridging function works by offering incentives for relayers to provide short-term loans to users on L1, which are repaid after two hours from a liquidity pool on L1. This pool is refilled when the funds arrive from L2 transactions. These transactions are insured by UMA’s Optimistic Oracle. You can read the details of how all this works in the Across litepaper or docs site.
Origins of Across
To date, Across has primarily been built by Risk Labs, the foundation that supports UMA. Across is being given away freely because:
This gives it the highest chance for success
It is an innovative use of UMA’s Optimistic Oracle (OO)
It’s the most fun thing we could think to do.
UMA’s Optimistic Oracle reports states-of-the-world to blockchains. It leverages game theoretical forces to ensure that contracts can trust its responses (Read more here). In contrast to an oracle that emphasizes price feed data, the OO specializes in generalized contracting. Across uses it to optimistically enforce contracts between the user transferring funds and the relayers earning fees. Risk Labs created Across to benefit Ethereum and demonstrate that the OO can be used to solve coordination problems in ways that are cheaper, faster, and more secure than other solutions.
Introducing the Fair Fair Launch
Any potential Across token distribution will be designed in public by the community. Everyone reading this is free to join the community in the coming weeks and become founding members. The fair fair launch is a social experiment. It is an offer to the world to take freely an audited, fully-functional protocol and see how a crypto-native community will choose to allocate ownership. To help structure the initial conversation, we are providing a v0 consensus mechanism that the community can iterate on.
Who Should Join?
Everyone who joins the Discord community has an opportunity to become a co-founder. The co-founders will design any potential Across token, allocation, and distribution. Alongside this job comes all the jobs of any new organization. Across will need engineers, content creators, customer support, (twitter) evangelists, HR, administrative effort, and business development. It needs to refine its mission, goals, and values. Across is a crypto-native community and will need its share of social and emotional labor: This means showing up on a regular basis, building relationships, smoothing miscommunications, and celebrating wins. Across can benefit from almost any well-intentioned effort and is an open invitation to become a co-founder in a new project. These co-founders will own the protocol.
Wen AcrossDAO?
Presently the admin functions of the Across contracts are in possession of the creators. As too are the social media platforms and branding assets. It is our commitment to hand the entirety of this over to the community when there is a sufficiently mature organization to receive it. This is a subjective evaluation and a public commitment. We expect there to be an evolving conversation with the Across community about when it’s ready to take the reins. Things we imagine should be established before this handoff: a robust consensus mechanism, a token distribution plan, and a development team. This handoff will mark the end of the fair fair launch and the start of the Across DAO (should the founders choose to name it that.)
Across Protocol is an intents-based interoperability protocol, capable of filling and settling cross-chain intents. It is made up of the Across Bridge, a powerfully efficient cross-chain transfer tool for end users, Across+, a chain abstraction tool that utilizes cross-chain bridge hooks to fulfill user intents and Across Settlement, a settlement layer for all cross-chain intent order flow. As the multichain economy continues to evolve, intents-based settlement is the key to solving interoperability and Across is at the core of its execution.
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