RSquad’s work on the TON/Ethereum bridge — the first stage is completed, a light client is created

Rsquadlab
4 min readDec 15, 2022

Together with the developers of the TON blockchain, the RSquad team completed the first and one of the most global stages of the development of the TON Trustless Bridge — the TON (light client) was created on the Ethereum virtual machine. It allows developers to validate blocks and transactions directly on the Ethereum network without the use of intermediaries.

As we already reported, the RSquad development team is working on a trustless bridge between TON and EVM-compatible networks (TON Trustless Bridge), through which it will be possible to transfer any tokens from the Ethereum or BNB Chain networks to the TON network and return them back, without resorting to the help of intermediaries (off-chain relayers and oracles).

What problem does TON Trustless Bridge solve?

TON Trustless Bridge, unlike a simple bridge, has an important advantage: the technology allows transactions between different blockchains without the use of intermediaries, that is, in the most secure way.

One of the fundamental problems of any cross-chain applications is the problem of trust. As a rule, such applications use networks of relayers or centralized services to transfer information between blockchains, which is an additional intermediary for the operation and reduces its transparency.

In addition, these intermediaries often become the target of attacks. We all remember one of the latest attacks on the Horizon cross-chain bridge of the Harmony protocol, as a result of which hackers stole about $100 million. In general, according to Chainalysis statistics, more than $2 billion has been lost as a result of attacks since the beginning of 2022.

Of course, there are also solutions without intermediaries, such as Atomic Swap, but they all pay for their transparency in user experience and speed.

The TON Trustless Bridge under development is a system for exchanging information, in particular issuing and burning wrapped native and non-native network tokens, between several blockchains.

TON Trustless Bridge is seen by the developers as a logical part of the implementation of the metaphor “TON is the Blockchain of Blockchains” from the original TON Whitepaper by providing a zero-trust service that will be as fully decentralized as possible. At the same time, the aforementioned service will be faster and cheaper than similar solutions on the market, and TON will act as the central blockchain for other platforms.

The resulting system can be used to create various kinds of decentralized applications that involve cross-chain interaction in order to eliminate intermediaries in transactions, such as bridges, DEXs with cross-chain liquidity pairs, blockchain games, and so on.

Development milestones and future plans

The work on developing the TON Trustless Bridge system consists of several stages. The first stage was the development of EVM smart contracts, which, as RSquad CTO Roman Nguyen explained, “allow you to read the messages of another blockchain and understand what is written in them. Since the protocols are completely different and the data is stored differently, the task was actually to create a lightweight client of one blockchain on a virtual machine of another blockchain.”

The created system made it possible for EVM-based decentralized applications to use data from the TON network, verify transmitted data without intermediaries, parse received data and perform actions in EVM-compatible blockchains based on reliable information received from the TON blockchain.

The task that the TON Trustless Bridge from the RSquad team should solve as a result is to ensure that blockchains, when exchanging data, can refuse to involve a third party - relayers, transferring all operations exclusively to smart contracts. Thanks to this, the TON blockchain virtual machine will learn to automatically receive and read messages from another blockchain - and vice versa, will ensure that virtual machines of other blockchains understand messages from TON.

Here is what Roman Nguyen, CTO of RSquad, told about the outcome of the first stage of development and further work plans:

– We have completed the TON light client on Ethereum. We are now conducting analytics on the implementation of the Ethereum light client on the TVM virtual machine, and in parallel, we plan to launch the development of a DApp, where users can get acquainted with the functionality and make their first trustless exchange on test networks.

– It was a big and difficult job. - said Anatoly Makosov (@tolya-yanot), one of the main developers of the TON Foundation - And we plan to place the source code on Solidity in December. The launch of a full-fledged Trustless bridge will take place in 2023, however, intermediate results, code and tools will be published as development progresses.

TON (The Open Network) is a high-performance first-class blockchain, which is an implementation of the Durov brothers' planned Telegram Open Network. After the Telegram team stopped developing TON, an active open-source development community continued to support the network and create new TON features, bringing the design of Telegram to life. As of 2019, the core network of TON is live, with ultra-cheap, fast, and environmentally friendly transactions.

As of 2022, the TON blockchain remains one of the few truly scalable blockchain projects capable of performing millions of true turing-full smart contract transactions per second.

RSquad Blockchain Lab – is an experienced international team with more than 7 years of experience in blockchain project development, advising and promotion services. RSquad has implemented and acted as a consultant in 75 blockchain projects for partners from 14 countries. The team consists of 30 development engineers who work on the full cycle of creating decentralized applications from interface design to smart contract development in various blockchains from Ethereum to Solana. RSquad acts as an advisor and partner to world-class blockchain projects.

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Rsquadlab

RSquad is a international team of experts specialized in the development of decentralized information systems based on blockchain technology.