Hello Gnosis Chain community, I am Dosh I contribute to Gnosis Chain and I am part of the comms team along with @john_szczepaniak and @armog . I work with various people and teams to help organize and streamline communications and wanted to share a post on the forum as a few folks wanted to voice their opinions on the matter of the BNB <> GC bridge.
The bridge team has carefully evaluated and made a decision regarding the native bridge between Binance Chain (BNB) and Gnosis Chain (GC). After considering various factors such as low traffic, non-native assets on each chain(USDC from BNB ≠ USDC from Ethereum), and alternative bridging solutions, the bridge team has decided to decommission this bridge. On Monday March 6th we reached out to the Gnosis Chain community on Discord and Telegram to communicate the closure of the BNB <> GC bridge.
To ensure a smooth transition, the bridge team will follow a two-step approach:
Step 1: Starting March 27th, 2023, the bridge team will disable incoming transactions from BNB to GC.
However, users can still bridge from GC to BNB during this time. The list of tokens that can be bridged during this time can be found here: Gnosis Chain Explorer - BlockScout
Step 2: On June 5th, 2023, the bridge team will completely decommission the bridge, including both directions.
If you are a user or team building applications on top of the BNB-GC AMB, please contact me or one of the comms members immediately by creating a support ticket on Discord: Gnosis Chain🦉
The bridge team is now focused on developing new iterations of the native bridge that prioritize enhanced security and decentralization. To learn more about the latest updates, check out Auryn MaCmillan’s recent Twitter thread on the topic.
The rationale for shutting it down is quite unclear. The process seems extremely hasty. I see that some alert was done on TG and Discord, but my 1st notice, as a bridge user, was the failing transactions. I consulted the official UI and I can see no notice there. This all seems unprofessional at best, and feels much like a rug pull (I noticed because I tried to bridge in the peg-in direction into GC; users who are pegging out may not notice until it’s too late)
I think that at the very least the BNB-GC AMB should be reopened and the smartcontract should be again unlocked. Deprecate only the official UI if you want.
It’s indisputably true that the Ethereum-peg tokens are much more used than those BSC-peg ones, but that should be no excuse. The tokens are used. There are even a few LPs, at least on Honey and Component. The risk of doing real economic damage to unsuspecting parties seems quite real.
I propose that the BNB-GC Omni bridge gets reopened and we only stop the UI side. This should prevent serious reputational damage.
Support requests should be kept at bay by disabling the UI. Technical users who remain bridging know what they are doing. The AMB for BSC, AMB Live Monitoring should keep providing the signatures, but the signers may stop auto-executing the claim transactions (to simplify at maximum). Users can do that.
If the cost of running BSC nodes is a concern, it may be acceptable that this gets outsourced to public nodes. The only requirement is to watch a specific contract, which has minimal cost, and something that many BSC providers today offer for free to power users. Finally, as a compensation for the lower usage, the fee may raise from 0.1% to 0.3%, to ensure that sufficient compensation remains.
My understanding is that most of the Omni infrastructure will anyway remain for the ETH side of the bridge. The marginal cost posed by the BSC side seems minor. If there is a cost motivation, I’d like to at least see how you estimate those potential savings be, and how they could be compensated in other ways, e.g., with the aforementioned proposal.
Although I never was too active at BSC and stopped using it more than a year ago this seems a good solution to me, will be happy if it could find it’s way to become a GIP and for sure would vote for it, if there are no other reasons to close this route.
perhaps the disabling too should have been subject to a GIP to begin with, since my understanding is that Omni / the AMB are part of the core infrastructure
agree, I would have preferred this too. Maybe @D0SH can forward this to the bridge team? Might be too late to completely reverse this, but at least assurance that this will not happen with the omnibridge to ethereum in the future would be appreciated.