LayerCake, in development by Flare Labs, is a decentralized insured-in-transit bridging and cross-network composability protocol. It offers increased security, speed, scalability and functionality of bridging between different smart contract networks.

In development by Flare Labs.

Why

Existing smart contract bridge designs suffer variously from centralization, poor safety guarantees, fragmented liquidity, latency and chain reorganization risk.
LayerCake is designed to be a faster, more secure and decentralized cross-network composability and bridging approach that mitigates chain reorganization risk and allows developers to set up automatic actions that complete in the same step as the bridging.

How

Every transfer in LayerCake is insured-in-transit with 1-to-1 backing by the actual asset being transferred. Using collateral in this way allows for lowest latency trustless bridging, while providing insurance against faulty operator behavior as well as blockchain reorgs that happen to a certain depth, e.g. 6 hours.

Once the crossing is complete and the wrapped asset is in the user’s account, the collateral is unlocked after a short period of time, ready to be used in another crossing. For this reason this collateral is termed “bandwidth”, because it dictates how much value can move across the bridge at any one time. Its existence renders LayerCake trustless, with no multisig, no governance role, nor any trusted party in the system.

The bandwidth collateral securing bridging comes from the bridge’s operators, who are called bandwidth providers. They take a small fee from each transaction. Bandwidth providers cannot secure a bridge crossing for a value higher than the amount of collateral they have locked.

The value that can cross the bridge at any one time is dictated by the total bandwidth held by the bridge. Like physical bridges, LayerCake bridges can handle any amount of “traffic” flowing across them over time. They only restrict the amount of traffic that can transit simultaneously.

To avoid fragmenting liquidity, LayerCake is multilateral. This means you can bridge a token, for instance wrapped ETH, from multiple origin chains to a single destination chain and receive the same token representation regardless of where it came from.

Fast, decentralized, multilateral & insured

bridging for smart contract tokens.

Fast, decentralized, multilateral & insured bridging for smart contract tokens.

Insured

User funds are 1:1 protected by bandwidth collateral whilst in transit between chains.

Cross-network composability

Custom code endpoints mean actions can be orchestrated across chains without the user needing to touch those chains.

Fast

Bandwidth collateral used to secure bridging events allows for lowest latency trustless bridging.

Decentralized

No multisig, no governance role and no trusted party in the system. Operates trustlessly.

Earn rewards

Users can receive rewards from the cross-chain incentive pool for bringing value on to Flare using LayerCake bridges.