Gnosis launches Hashi bridge aggregator to help prevent hacks

Gnosis, the team behind Gnosis Safe multi-sig and Gnosis Chain, has launched a hash oracle aggregator for blockchain bridges, according to an announcement from the company. In a conversation with Cointelegraph, Gnosis CEO Martin Köppelmann stated that the new aggregator should make bridges more secure by requiring more than one bridge to validate a withdrawal before it can be confirmed.

Multiple bridge protocols have already committed to integrating with Hashi, including Succinct Labs, DendrETH, ZK Collective, Connext, Celer, LayerZero, Axiom, Wormhole and LI.FI, according to the announcement.

Over $2 billion was stolen from bridges in 2021 and 2022, according to a report by Token Terminal. Bugs in the code have caused some bridge hacks, whereas others have been caused by the attacker taking over a multi-sig governance wallet.

According to Köppelmann, Hashi can provide the first step towards making these cross-chain transactions more secure throughout the blockchain ecosystem, by requiring withdrawals to be validated by multiple bridges instead of just one:

Hashi is about essentially creating this aggregator that can use different bridges and basically say they all need to agree to the same message […] If they do, great, then we can be really, really certain that this message is actually real and if they disagree […] Then we know we need to escalate to governance, we need to halt the bridge.

Köppelmann also emphasized that Hashi helps to prevent multi-sig governance attacks because it allows a protocol to prevent governance from intervening if there is no disagreement between individual bridges.

“Here you can have this nice tradeoff where you say ‘the governance is not allowed to do anything,’ so it cannot interfere with the system unless there is explicitly a conflict or a bug,” he explained. “So as soon as those bridges that are supposed to report on the same thing […] Disagree, well then governance is allowed to interfere, otherwise governance has no role. That’s Hashi.”

Hashi is open source and available on GitHub.

The idea of a multi-bridge aggregator rose to prominence during the Uniswap bridge debate in December and January. Although Wormhole was ultimately chosen as Uniswap’s bridge provider, representatives from Celer, LiFi, and deBridge, as well as other participants concluded that a multi-bridge aggregation solution needed to be implemented going forward.