@Jacksteroo @lij @giv @dpagan-harmony @frwrdslosh
Update: We’ve found 3 signers (@MarcMorales94, @eddnorris, and @Nwaobi_Daniel) from the Harmony community to complete our multisig 5 of 9 requirement. Grant payment form has been submitted for the first three milestones.
Hi there,
Given the information available regarding the recent Horizon Bridge exploit, can you outline how Strudel’s bridge could be more secure and which key details you bring to the table that would help to build user trust? Also, how does your product differ from the Trustless bridges that Harmony is launching/ updating?
Hey @Pioneer! I’m glad to see community interest in our protocol! Bit of a wall of text, but I hope the response below is sufficient:
By eliminating the need for custodial control of assets with typical wrappers, Strudel’s trustless protocol trades counterparty risk for market risk while using market dynamics, crypto-economic incentives, and cross-chain capabilities to maintain a pegged, scalable, and capital-efficient ecosystem.
We’re able to ensure the trustless locking of assets without counterparties, using a relayer protocol. For our deployment here, the BTC relayer will be managed by Harmony. The bridging assets get tagged with code that looks like this (using BTC example):
There are some differences between Harmony’s trustless bridge and ours. One noteable difference is our one-way mechanism, opposed to Harmony’s bidirectional model. vBTC (Strudel bitcoin) is minted from the locking of Bitcoin, that asset’s value is now permanently stored in the protocol on said chain, in this case Harmony’s.
The mint only happens after verification of the BTC transaction to mint vBTC and Strudel. In terms of hacking this significantly reduces incentive as it isn’t a reversible transaction. With the exception of managing the server, there is little human interaction/interference. Things are primarily automated.
Regarding the Horizon bridge exploit, I believe the issue may have pertained to a low signature multisig being exploited. Our multisig on Harmony will require a minimum of 5 signatures out of 9 total signers. This figure can always be increased, but we will start with this level of security.
Strudel first launched in Fall of 2020, though we have had some volatility with price action the team has continued to work (with limited resources) on ways to expand our reach and usecase and we feel that we can be an added benefit to the Harmony ecosystem.
We’ve been listed on DappRadar which should fulfill the retroactive grant stipulation. @cheualx and I tested the bridge over Zoom yesterday and I answered other questions about our protocol and what our plans are for Harmony long-term.
@steadylearner would like to get started on the farm deployment (Sushi fork), but he needs to be paid for the considerable amount of work he’s done so far. @lij @cheualx just to recap, we’ve completed the first three grant stipulations for a total of $30k in ONE.
Example on Ethereum:
This is great work. Weldone @Squirtle
Update:
Just so everything is in one place. I’ll add links for each milestone we completed, the final being in March for our deployment. @cheualx @Jacksteroo
Testnet: December
Mainnet: March
Deployment on mainnet was delayed some weeks as @steadylearner had to wait for the Harmony BTC relayer to be addressed and also to be given updated links by the dev team. We had been communicating with the Harmony team via our Telegram group.
Multisig:
First iteration: October/November
Second (current): March/April:
I went over the bridge with @cheualx over Zoom about a week or so ago and also applied Strudel DAO to DappRadar (and was accepted) per @cheualx’s request which was a retroactively added stipulation. Our first three milestones also meet Harmony’s retroactively added 180 day completion window even with having to wait to deploy.
The final stipulation, 10k active users, suggested by @lij we do not meet.
Though there was some discussion about potentially amending that for milestones like our planned farms (Sushi fork) and lending pools for our wrapped bitcoin. It would be great if some consideration could be made there, but either way we plan to continue building on Harmony.
Planned farms:
We submitted for payment some weeks ago and KYC months previously. We are hoping we can receive funding for the first three stipulations ($10k each) this coming week @Jacksteroo @cheualx.
It seems that this project has been approved for the grant and actively communicating with their grant manager(s) through private messages throughout their development process. Is there any update on behalf of the Harmony grant team @cheualx ? Many projects are left in the dark regarding the new grant expectations and whether or not their previous agreement with Harmony will be honored and funded?
At first I though that Strudel had not been active, but now that they have shared all of this it is pretty much indisputable that they met the expectations of their initial grant milestones.
Would be nice that the Harmony team interacts with the projects taht are delivering what their promises… seems thats its hard to trust harmony right now due the way they are treating the people who is trying to improve the ecosystem… at least give them and awnser to know what’s the situation 
Exactly, and its very sad there hasn’t been a single follow up response concerning the project from the harmomy team even with all these well met deliverables.
“I’m really eager to see the progress on this project by the team in the following weeks to come🍻”
Thanks for the support guys @Pioneer @MarcMorales94 @Nwaobi_Daniel. As @Pioneer noted we meet the six month retroactively added time limit. Initially it appeared that we didn’t, but I provided proof that as early as March, we had our full product launched on Harmony mainnet. That was in addition to having to wait on Harmony to fix issues on their end, which I also provided evidence for.
Communication with the team has not been great. I’m aware there is a lot going on in the Harmony ecosystem currently, and this may not be a priority.
For a fledgling project such as ours, this grant is quite a big deal. We had to use our personal funds to upstart and complete this project. We have been in contact with them (especially their devs) the entire time as well. Harmony gave their word, and as professionals I would expect them to honor that. I was glad to see Harmony pivot to unfreezing grants for those they had already approved, as that would have undoubtedly led to a mass exodus to other chains/platforms.
Speaking to @M87 of SonicSwap it appears we’re not the only project waiting.
Github is open source:
Mainnet:
Here are links from the deployment in March:
So, we launched the bridge on Harmony mainnet in March, we continued (April onwards - ) to tweak front-end and find ways to improve on the bridge, this all had to be done on mainnet with the relayer not working on testnet. That culminated in some design and mobile wallet changes. The transactions seen in June were tests on a new mobile bitcoin wallet that we thought fit better for this. As mentioned earlier the relayer was not working on Harmony testnet, and since we were already fully deployed we bought bitcoin and ran these tests.
Just wanted to reiterate we had no plans to market this yet in terms of the question regarding user activity. It was fully functional since March, but we wanted to make sure it fit our standards. The plan was to then deploy our farms at which point it would be more logical to bridge over our community and market it outside of our community as well.
Update: Still waiting on payment after @Jacksteroo had us submit forms for our three milestones.
Multisig:
0x1567442538f5f0d0411DED1F701d95fc79E80197
Funded 1,2,3 (testnet, multisig, mainnet): 0x561614c16d0626c19ee102974607a97d9d8f1358aeacbc79d2bfee5b2539e7f8
Great to see Harmony making good on their promises
Yes, Harmony kept their word! This really means a lot to us as we put quite a bit of our personal funds a long with manpower into this. Thank you to @cheualx, @Jacksteroo and the rest of the team. It is greatly appreciated.
We’re excited to get started on our incentivised farms (sushi fork) as previously discussed. From there, long-term we plan to seek VC investment to get our lending pools started with Tranquil and/or Qi for our wrapped bitcoin.
Congrats @Squirtle Glad Harmony was able to keep to their word.
