Fantastic news from the Kinetex team!

Kinetex has become one of the finalists of the ETHGlobal Hackathon in Paris, where Kinetex co-founders presented Kinetex Light Clients!

The team is super proud of this achievement and excited to apply this solution in the upcoming mode of the Kinetex dApp, Flash Trade. It is a decentralized cross-chain public resolving solution that enables users to swap directly with professional market makers while enjoying high speed and security.

Problems of Cross-chain Transactions & Kinetex Approach

Unlike many other DeFi projects, Kinetex does not strive to become the best bridge or message protocol. Instead, the team focuses on promoting the concept of composability and unification of DeFi sector solutions.

The Kinetex team proposes a new approach for moving liquidity. Rather than relying on a controlled liquidity pool often vulnerable to attacks, Kinetex transfers control to a decentralized market. In this market, users create swap orders, and professional resolvers take on the risks of managing the swaps while charging a commission for them. Such an approach fosters a genuinely decentralized and fair market, where resolvers compete to serve users, and users benefit from better prices and speed.

After conducting a thorough analysis, the team has determined several critical issues that need to be resolved to ensure the efficiency and reliability of the system. One of the primary concerns is the time it takes to validate each transaction, which has been found to range from 2 to 5 minutes on average. Additionally, the cost of gas and slippage can fluctuate during the validation period, leading to further complications. Another issue that has been identified is that the bridges lack a batch system to optimize gas costs, which can result in unnecessary expenses.

Kinetex Light Clients help to solve all those issues by enabling batch processing. Such an approach allows for direct peer-to-peer transactions between users and resolvers, eliminating the need to wait for validators and, hence, depend on them. As a result, Kinetex is able to reduce gas costs significantly. Moreover, by using Zero-knowledge technology (Zk technology) in the batches, gas optimization is enhanced even further.

What Is a Light Client?

Blockchain ecosystems rely heavily on light clients, software that allows for secure and decentralized access to the blockchain and interactions without synchronizing it entirely. Since nodes run light client software, these terms often are used interchangeably.

Initially, Ethereum only had full nodes responsible for verifying and relaying transactions and blocks on the chain. These nodes needed to download and verify every block in the blockchain to ensure its security and integrity. This process was complicated, laborious, costly, and not always necessary.

As a solution, light clients were created. These clients do not store the full copy of the blockchain and use full nodes as intermediaries instead to interact with the blockchain and perform various operations that require more data.

Kinetex Zk Clients

The introduction of Zk technology in the work of light clients allows Kinetex to optimize the verification process even more. Kinetex Zk light clients require fewer data and computational resources than traditional light clients that have to start from the beginning or where they last stopped and compute headers sequentially up to the target, which can span millions of blocks. In contrast, a Zk light client can verify the chain from the beginning of the last verified block up to the target with just one proof and a few public input hashes.

The Kinetex on-chain light clients are versatile: they can be deployed on any EVM network and store the state of supported networks. Kinetex utilizes the block hash function to get one of the last 256 blocks and then uses cross-chain messaging protocols to transfer this block hash to networks where light clients are deployed.

The solution is based on Hashi adapters developed specifically for various cross-chain messaging protocols, including Chainlink CCIP, Axelar, Hyperlane, and ZetaChain. Using multiple protocols, Kinetex can support light clients for a wide range of networks, including Ethereum, Gnosis, Polygon, Linea, Celo, etc.

To streamline the process of transferring data even more, Kinetex does not transmit every block hash individually and executes the BlockReporter contract every 1024 blocks instead, creating checkpoints. Based on these checkpoints, Merkle trees of block hash batches are constructed and stored in the appendable Merkle Mountain Range for enhanced efficiency (inspired by Axiom’s idea).

Final Thoughts

The victory in this hackathon showed that the team is on the right track and that technologies and developments aimed at improving cross-chain technologies and, consequently, accessibility of DeFi products are truly needed today. The team is incredibly proud of this achievement and is thrilled for you to try Flash Trade mode closer to the end of this year!

Stay tuned!

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