Welcome BUSD and LINK on Harmony

(This blog is originally published on Oct 19, 2020 and now reposted here.)

ho·ri·zon /həˈrīzən/: the line at which the earth’s surface and the sky appear to meet.

Harmony has launched Horizon, the first version of its Ethereum-Harmony cross-chain bridge, on the mainnet. This is the foundation of many upcoming initiatives designed to bolster a vibrant crosschain ecosystem on Harmony that will allow users and developers to smoothly interact with multiple chains. When you feel like you have reached the natural limitations of a blockchain, that is where we will meet you — at the Horizon.

Horizon opens up the gates for assets to flow freely between Harmony and Ethereum blockchains and will enable users to bridge any ERC20 token, as well as LINK and BUSD. Horizon will be released in phases with the next phase being fully trustless and permissionless.

Horizon enables the secure bridging of two important assets to our chain: BUSD and LINK. As the first official stablecoin on Harmony, BUSD will pave the way for many of our ecosystem projects to utilize cheap and fast value transfer. With LINK and Chainlink Oracle deployed on mainnet, Harmony ecosystem projects will be able to provide ONE-ETH atomic loans and many more use cases by using trustless oracle.

A bridge is a technology that connects two blockchains by using two flows with the ability to verify crosschain transactions:

i) transfer assets flow: assets are locked on Ethereum and equivalent amount are minted on Harmony

ii) redeem assets flow: minted assets on Harmony are burned and the equivalent amount are unlocked on Ethereum

We optimized for four principles in bridge our design:

In order to address the critical need for a bridge in the short term, we will follow a multi-phase approach. This initial version of the bridge is focused on providing a seamless and low-cost solution for bringing assets to Harmony in a trusted yet secure manner. The final phase of the bridge will be fully trustless and decentralized.

Ethereum-to-Harmony (transfer assets) flow:

Harmony-to-Ethereum (redeem assets) flow:

Some key properties:

Being developer-friendly is one of our top priorities and soon we will release the bridge APIs and supporting services to enable any developer or application to directly utilize Horizon. This will allow any application to swap assets and use them within the application on a single interface.

We are also working towards the trustless and decentralized version of Horizon. A white paper on our novel design is expected to be released soon. It will describe our innovations towards gas-efficient light clients, trustless cross-chain block relayers, and efficient provers and verifiers, while keeping our end goal of: trustless, decentralized, cost effective, and seamless cross-chain bridge.

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