Exploring new ways to bridge with Catalyst

[dpbpolymer]

Experimental idea: A gift link to help friends onboard to a new chain.

User story:

• A users I want to invite my friend to a new chain or rollup and gift them some initial funds to get started.

Objectives:

• The user can top up a vault on the target chain with funds from any chain or wallet they desire.
• User defines a time period in which their friend can claim these funds and generates a link by submitting the transaction.
• This link is then shared with the friend who can input their address and receive funds on the new chain.

Implementation tips:

• If the friend is entering a new chain/rollup then they might not have native gas tokens, its ideal to
  • Deduct the transaction fees from the user creating the gift link, ensuring a zero-cost experience for the recipient.
  • Convert a small portion of the gifted amount into the chain's gas token, equipping the recipient with immediate transaction capabilities.

Future development:

• Expansion into a Gifting Protocol: Envision transforming this platform into a comprehensive gifting ecosystem, allowing for the transfer of both monetary gifts and NFTs.
• Personalized NFT Gifting: Introduce a feature where users can upload an image to the gift, enabling the recipient to mint it as their first NFT.
• Flexible Destination Choices: Empower recipients with the freedom to select their preferred token or chain for receiving the funds, further developing into a payments interface or QR code system to pay or receive funds.
• Secure Timeout Feature: Implement a timeout function, that automatically refunds the funds to the sender if the gift remains unclaimed within the set period.

For this quest we have Catalyst entering as the perfect protocol to help in asset bridging with their cross-chain AMM. Link to their resources.

Note: In testnet Polymer only supports Optimism and Base, your test application should be operational on these chain to qualify.

[zomico]

This is an interesting idea for onboarding new users to different blockchains and rollups. The ability to send a "gift link" with pre-loaded funds could definitely lowered the barrier to entry. However, there are a few concerns I have with the proposed implementation:

Security risks around shared links - passing around links containing funds seems inherantly risky from a security perspective. Naively implemented, these links could potentially be intercepted or shared unintentionally. Strong encryption and access controls would need to be inplace.
UX challenges - The process of generating a link, sending it to someone, and having them claim it adds several extra steps compared to a normal send transaction. This could create UX frition, especially for non-technical users.
Gas costs - Even if the sender covers inital gas costs, the recipient will eventually need to aquire more of the native gas token for that chain to continue using it long-term. So the "zero cost" experience is temporary.
Chain support - Initially limiting the scope to just a few EVM chains makes sence for testing, but ideally this type of solution would need to supportmany chains simultaneously to be broadly useful.
Centralization risks - Depending on how its architected, this could require a central coordinating server that mains the links, gift balances, etc. This re-introduces some centralization trust assumptions.

[r3ndyyy]

hmm, ok