Geregè is a trust-minimised bridge that connects the Cosmos Ecosystem with Ethereum Layer 2s, powered by zero-knowledge. Geregè is designed to become the largest zkbridge ecosystem that connects all blockchains through trustless bridging.
“The Gerege – The First Universal Token known in the World as a Foreign Passport”
The Pax Mongolica
Over centuries, the Mongol Empire's peaceful reign facilitated uninterrupted trade and cultural exchange between Europe and Asia along the Silk Road. This inspired the growth of multicultural cities and the spread of ideas and technologies.
At Geregè Protocol, we are inspired by this historical legacy and strive to usher in a new era of "Multi-Chain Peace" across diverse blockchains. Our goal is to enable seamless asset and data transfer, and facilitate the emergence of groundbreaking innovations that will shape the future of Web3.
To foster a harmonious and interconnected multi-chain ecosystem for seamless exchange of value, ideas and innovation.
The Trust-minimised Bridge
Geregè is the first dedicated trust-minimised IBC routing chain. It leverages an innovative consensus engine, zero-knowledge technology to achieve a highly efficient and scalable IBC packet routing solution. We are positioning Geregè as part of a longer trajectory where blockchains will be shifted more than its monolithic presence.
Due to IBC’s rigorous security standards and specifications, it is not natively compatible with all major blockchains, which has prevented industry-wide adoption. Amherst Labs is tackling the challenge of upgrading IBC functionality and expanding the IBC network across the blockchain industry.
Inspire confidence through multi-chain security and robustness.
Throughout the history of trade, few things have been as important as trust. Merchants and traders, from ancient times to the present day, have relied on trust to build relationships and facilitate transactions. However, in an age of global trade where merchants and buyers may never meet face-to-face, how can trust be established?
At Amherst Labs, we are building Geregè to operate in a trust-minimised environment with the help of zero-knowledge proof technology, providing a high level of security and reliability for users. The Geregè Protocol is inspired by the ancient "Gerege", a golden tablet that served as a foreign passport of the highest order, granting Marco Polo seamless travels through the Silk Road to connect the West with the East. Just as it served a key role in the explosion of trade between east and west, Geregé is the future of cross-chain protocols, promising to revolutionize the way we think about trade across different blockchains, starting with Cosmos and Layer 2s.
The stability brought about by Mongols opened up the ancient trade routes to an undisturbed exchange of goods between peoples from Europe to East Asia. This trade route facilitated the exchange of various goods, including silk, paper, compasses, and gunpowder, which played a significant role in shaping modern technology.
However, just as the ancient Silk Road was threatened by raiders, current blockchain ecosystems face significant losses from insecure bridges due to hacker attacks. To address these concerns, we are promoting IBC as the practical industry standardised bridging solution, and we developed Geregè zkIBC, a trust-minimised cross-chain bridge.
We recognize that the current state of blockchain interoperability is fragmented and lacks security, with competing standards and solutions causing developer friction. We see Geregè zkIBC as an antidote to this chaos, providing stability to cross-chain communication. We believe that Geregè zkIBC, built on the IBC protocol, can offer the necessary security and standardisation for efficient blockchain interoperability without the need for trust assumptions, thanks to the zero-knowledge technology. While some currently view IBC as only serving the Cosmos ecosystem, we sees it as ideal standard for interoperability across all chains, credits to its superior security and decentralisation compared to other solutions.
The problem: current cross-chain bridge solutions either have poor performance or rely on centralised parties, leading to recurring attacks that have cost users over 1.5 billion USD following hacks on bridges like Wormhole and Nomad.
The success of a bridge relies on the consensus protocols of both involved chains. For example, if one chain, T1, runs Proof-of-Work, a light client protocol may be used. In this case, a smart contract on the other chain, T2, referred to as ST2, would keep track of T1's block headers to verify transaction inclusion and other events using zero-knowledge proofs. However, this approach results in significant computation and storage overhead for ST2, as it needs to verify all block headers and maintain a continuously growing list of them. Verification can be even more expensive for non-PoW chains. For instance, verifying a single block header on Ethereum for a bridge between Ethereum and a Proof-of-Stake chain, such as Cosmos, would cost around 64 million gas, which is impractical.
At present, many bridge protocols employ a committee-based approach as an efficient alternative. In these systems, a committee of validators is responsible for approving state transfers. However, this approach has major issues. Firstly, it relies on an extra trust assumption in the committee, which makes bridged assets less secure than native ones, thus complicating the security analysis of downstream applications. Secondly, relying on a small committee can result in single points of failure. For example, in the recent Ronin bridge exploit, attackers were able to steal 624 million USD by obtaining five of the nine validator keys, making it the largest attack in the history of DeFi as of April 2022. The second and third largest attacks also targeted bridges, with $611m stolen from PolyNetwork and $326m stolen from Wormhole, with key compromise suspected in the PolyNetwork attack.