TOKI’s Incentivized Testnet: IBC Bridge with Multi-Prover Security Combining TEE and ZKP
Table of contents
Introduction
We are thrilled to announce the launch of the TOKI incentivized testnet! This exciting journey, set to span the next several months, will elevate our platform’s stability and quality in two dynamic phases: 1. Testnet for Transfer and 2. Testnet for Transfer and Pool.
TOKI has been expanding IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication) beyond Cosmos SDK chains for the past few years with its unique approach ‘the multi-prover security’ — the combination of different security models, TEE (SGX, AMD, etc) and ZKP. We have successfully established the first IBC connection between Ethereum and BNB Chain, with a single-sided unified liquidity pool to enable a seamless 1-click native token swap.
In this post, we will elaborate on TOKI’s features to give you a deeper understanding of our cross-chain infrastructure and how to use our testnet app.
Please explore all the sections and join our testnet to provide valuable feedback to help us refine our product. Early contributors are always highly valued and crucial to our community. Let’s shape the future of “The Internet of Blockchains” together!
TOKI’s Features
TOKI is built on three innovative layers designed to deliver unique features that enhance security, usability, and revenue potential. Let’s explore each layer:
1. The multi-prover security in IBC
At the heart of TOKI is our innovative use of IBC and a multi-prover security approach as a messaging layer. This ensures a secure, open, and comprehensive message passing across various blockchains.
Why IBC?
The answer is that IBC is a truly comprehensive and open messaging standard unlike any other.
- The most comprehensive: The IBC standard only enables truly permissionless connections and any general transactions, including asynchronous ones. Learn more here.
- No vendor lock-in: IBC is the only open protocol without ties to business models, tokens, or business interests, ensuring complete freedom and flexibility, much like today’s TCP/IP.
- The most proven track record: With $2.9 billion in monthly transaction volume, zero exploits, and a vast developer community contributing, IBC truly stands out.
These features create a powerful flywheel effect, spreading IBC everywhere.
Moreover, history shows that stand-alone standards tied to specific entities, business models, tokens, or IPs — like those from the protocol wars of the 1970s and 1980s — do not survive in the long run. For further information, please visit here.
Why multi-prover security?
When it comes to verifying the validity of state transitions across chains, two key questions arise: ‘How’ do we verify? And, ‘who’ will verify?
How do we verify?
There are two major approaches: full-node verification and light-client verification.
- Full-node verification: Most current bridges use this method because of its technical simplicity, but it comes with high maintenance costs and limited decentralization.
- Light client verification: This approach is much lighter than full nodes, allowing us to implement its functionality directly into the code.
TOKI employs the light-client verification approach due to its lightweight and efficient nature.
Who will verify?
Who or where to verify using light clients is crucial for ensuring security. Here are several approaches:
- Connected chains: This approach involves implementing a light client smart contract on each connected chain. It is the most trust-minimized method but is currently infeasible on certain blockchains, particularly Ethereum.
- Middle PoS Chain (Economic Security): This method uses a PoS chain as an intermediary to verify and submit proofs. While it provides economic security, it is inefficient and unsustainable for a bridge. For example, maintaining a PoS chain with a $500 million FDV and allocating 7% of tokens to validators would cost around $35 million annually.
- TEE (Hardware Security): This approach involves implementing light client logic within TEEs like SGX. TEEs have not been exploited in practice, proving their high-security level. They also offer cost efficiency and minimal latency. However, potential bugs could be a concern.
- ZKP (Software Security): This method implements light client logic using Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP). It is highly trust-minimized but still nascent, with potential bugs, higher gas costs, and latency.
- Multi-sig: This approach has been compromised multiple times and is not reliable. It also tends to rely on full nodes.
In short, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. So, what’s the answer? It’s the multi-prover security model, which compensates for the weaknesses of each individual method. TOKI has combined TEE and ZKP, and plans to incorporate economic security in the near future.
Here’s the high-level architecture of our multi-prover security model.
- TEE Prover: This handles the verification process and generates proofs as the primary prover. Because the TEE node is stateless, its operation costs are significantly reduced.
- ZK Prover: This resolves disputes among TEE provers and is used for specific cases, such as high-value transfers.
- Economic Security: This effectively enhances the multi-prover security model.
We call the module that configures a multi-prover setting the Light Client Proxy (LCP). With LCP, any application or blockchain can easily set up its own configurations, benefiting from low operation costs and robust security. This flexibility allows various operators to set up LCP, promoting decentralization and accelerating innovation, as shown in the diagram below. Without LCP, a few dominant bridge protocols would control everything, which is an undesirable outcome.
In summary, a highly efficient and trust-minimized multi-prover approach, combined with IBC, a truly open protocol, will be essential for creating an open and secure infrastructure: the Internet of Blockchains.
<Mental model>
While we are pioneers in adopting the multi-prover approach for cost-effective and trust-minimized inter-chain connections, other notable projects are also recognizing its importance. For instance, major ZK-Rollups like Taiko and Scroll use the ‘TEE + ZK’ approach. Uniswap and Aave have also conducted bridge assessments, concluding that multiple bridge setups are optimal.
Taiko | Scroll | Uniswap | Aave
2. Single-sided unified liquidity pool
Building on the robust messaging layer we discussed earlier, TOKI introduces a single-sided unified liquidity pool as its first-party app. This innovative feature eliminates the complexities of managing wrapped tokens, enabling effortless, one-click native token swaps across different chains.
Benefits
- For Swap Users: Enjoy one-click native token transfers without worrying about transaction failures on the destination chain, thanks to guaranteed finality.
- For Liquidity Providers: Benefit from no impermanent loss, superior capital efficiency, and enhanced safety.
We create a universal unified liquidity network by virtually connecting single-sided liquidity pools across different blockchains, providing significant benefits like those mentioned above.
Of course, this system inherits the robust properties of our underlying messaging layer.
One-click native token transfer
Single-sided liquidity pool
To ensure deep liquidity, we will issue TOKI tokens to incentivize liquidity providers and support ecosystem growth.
Learn more about TOKI’s unified liquidity here.
3. 3rd-party app layer
TOKI infrastructure offers high composability in both messaging and liquidity layers, abstracting away the complexity of cross-chain transactions for various use cases such as swaps, transfers, NFT purchases, lending, and more.
One notable achievement using TOKI’s infrastructure is with Progmat, which provides a platform that enables the issuance of stablecoins compliant with Japanese legislation. Through this integration, TOKI will function similarly to USDC’s CCTP, facilitating seamless stablecoin transfers across chains.
We are always open to endless possibilities with third-party app integration. This layer allows external developers to build on our platform, fostering innovation and offering users diverse applications. Consequently, it maximizes revenue potential.
TOKI’s achievement
Since emerging from stealth mode a year ago, TOKI has made powerful and cutting-edge announcements with our partners. Here are some notable achievements:
Partnerships with
- Financial institutions:
Progmat (Japanese regulations-compliant stablecoin issuance) and more - Foundations:
Interchain Foundation (continuously contributing to expanding Interchain Stack (CometBFT, Cosmos SDK, IBC, CosmWasm, CosmJS) and community engagement, among other things) - IBC Tech Providers:
Union, Composable Finance, Confio, Landslide, Strangelove, and more (leveraging each other’s strengths and expanding each project’s applicability) - L1 Blockchains:
Noble, XION, Oasys, and more (leveraging 3rd-party integration among other things)
These are just a glimpse of our disclosed achievements so far. We are actively working on many ongoing collaborations and will keep you updated through our community channels. Stay tuned for more exciting news!
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Thank you for reading this far. Now, let’s dive into the details of the Incentivized Testnet!
How to participate
There are 5 STEPS to use our testnet app. We will go through each one in detail.
Note:
Due to our limited resources, user support during the testnet phase is not guaranteed. However, you can send feedback in the #testnet-feedback channel on Discord, and we will handle it step by step. We welcome your feedback. See more details in the “Feedback” section.
Step 1: Go to the faucet page
The first step is to go to our faucet page to get your tokens for our testnet app.
CAUTION⚠: To avoid phishing attacks, ensure you’re visiting the correct URL: https://faucet.toki.finance/
Step 2: Connect your wallet
Then, connect your MetaMask wallet to our faucet page.
Step 3: Get the testnet tokens for the testnet app
You need to get both “ETH and BNB testnet tokens” and “demo tokens for USDC, USDT, and wrapped ETH.”
ETH and BNB testnet tokens
You can get ETH and BNB testnet tokens from external faucet pages, provided by Alchemy, Google, and BNB Chain. These tokens will be used for gas fees on both the Ethereum Sepolia testnet and the BNB Chain testnet.
note: You will need at least 0.001 ETH on the Ethereum mainnet in order to get the testnet tokens.
Demo tokens for USDC, USDT, and ETH
Next, you can get our demo testnet tokens on our faucet page. Here is the list of tokens available on the faucet page:
- USDC and USDT on the Ethereum Sepolia testnet
- USDC and USDT on the BSC testnet
Caution: We have temporarily halted the minting of wrapped ETH on the BSC Testnet because of misuse.
After choosing the network and token, click the “Connect Wallet” button to link your MetaMask wallet. Then, click the “Send Me Testnet Token” button to execute the mint function. This process requires gas on the testnet. If you don’t have gas tokens in your wallet, you can get them from the following links: ETH (provided by Alchemy / Google) and BNB (provided by BNB Chain).
Once your transaction is sent to the network, you can see your transaction status from the link in “Your transactions.” The link goes to Etherscan or BscScan, where you can see detailed information about your transaction, including the status (e.g., success, pending).
How to Display Testnet Tokens on Your MetaMask Wallet?
Tips: You can make those testnet tokens visible on your MetaMask by following the instructions below:
1. Click “+ Import tokens” on your MetaMask
2. Paste the corresponding contract addresses below in “Token contract address.”Ethereum Sepolia
- USDC: 0x74ce1e12998fB861A612CD6C65244f8620e2937A
- USDT: 0xe90a57A45F1Eae578F5aec8eed5bA8Fc6F55eF65BNB Smart Chain Testnet
- USDC: 0xb48249Ef5b895d6e7AD398186DF2B0c3Cec2BF94
- USDT: 0x37fFAb7530Fbb7E8b4bFeC152132929bdCdae3F3
Step 4: Go to the transfer page
Now, you are ready to try our testnet app!
Go to the testnet transfer page using the link below.
CAUTION⚠: To avoid phishing attacks, ensure you’re visiting the correct URL: https://testnet.toki.finance/transfer
Step 5: Execute cross-chain transfers!
Finally, you can execute cross-chain transfers by selecting the network and the token in both the “From” and “To” areas, entering the amount, and clicking “Approve”.
If you don’t have any preferences, let’s start by sending 100 USDC from Sepolia Ethereum to BSC Testnet.
Step 6: Participate in the Liquidity Pools!
The newly added Liquidity feature is up and running! You can start benefiting from securing funds in the available pools.
Based on your current funds, you can choose from a virtually infinite range of amounts to Add and Remove the currencies from and back into your wallet.
All of these new functions are looking great under the new UI we recently launched.
Stay tuned and always check our updated roadmap section for what’s coming next!
Feedback / FAQ
Please send us your feedback if you find any issues or bugs while using our testnet app. We will improve our product based on your valuable feedback toward the mainnet launch.
You can send your feedback using Tickets, a ticketing bot, in the #testnet-feedback channel on our Discord Server. The #known-issues channel lists the issues already reported but not yet fixed. Additionally, the #testnet-annoucements channel provides updates about our testnet app.
How to send feedback on Discord
You are all welcome to share any feedback! Specifically, if your report is related to bugs, please include:
- Steps to reproduce (especially for UI-related issues)
- If a transaction is involved, please include the relevant blockchain, the transaction hash (TxHash), and the user’s address
Here’s how to send feedback on our Discord server.
Go to the TOKI Discord server, navigate to #testnet-bug-report channel, and click “Create ticket.”
You should see the report form below.
After entering the problem you are facing, click the “Submit” button.
Then, a new channel will be created with your ticket to discuss with us. You can share images, such as screenshots, on the channel as well.
*Note*
Due to our limited resources, user support is not guaranteed during the testnet phase. However, you can send feedback in the testnet instruction channel on Discord, and we will handle it step by step. We welcome your feedback.
Weekly Feedback Session
We’ll have weekly feedback sessions during the initial phase after the testnet launch. Starting from August 5th, these sessions will be held every Monday at 11:00 am UTC on Discord, using a stage channel.
Feel free to join us!
For TEE node operators and app developers
We welcome validators to help diversify our TEE nodes. More details will be announced when we are ready to accommodate TEE node operators.
App developers interested in using TOKI’s messaging layer or liquidity features, please contact us here.
Roadmap
Please note that the estimated dates are subject to change. The latest updates will be announced via Discord and X.
- Incentivized testnet for liquidity provision (Nov 2024)
Liquidity provision functionality will be enabled. - β mainnet launch (Q1 2025)
The first Ethereum and BNB Chain IBC connection is finally made available on the mainnet!
The point program will begin at the same time. The activities during the testnet will be reflected. - Major mainnet launch (Q2 2025 onwards)
The IBC connection will be everywhere! (Major networks)
To check the latest TOKI milestones, click here.
Conclusion
The launch of the TOKI incentivized testnet marks a significant milestone in our journey toward revolutionizing blockchain interoperability. This event provides an invaluable opportunity for our community to engage with and contribute to the evolution of our platform.
We invite blockchain enthusiasts to join us in testing and refining TOKI. Your feedback will be crucial in ensuring the robustness and efficiency of our platform. Early contributors will play a vital role in shaping the future of the Internet of Blockchains. Let’s collaborate to build a more secure, efficient, and interconnected blockchain ecosystem.
Join us on this exciting journey and help us create the next generation of blockchain interoperability!
>>> Go to the Faucet page
>>> Go to the TOKI Transfer page
And, don’t forget to follow us on X and join our Discord for more updates.
