Bridges are Broken – It’s Time for Atomic Swaps
Ever wonder why bridges keep getting hacked and losing billions?
It’s not bad luck, it’s bad architecture!
Let’s break down how cross-chain trading should work 🧵👇
Most bridges work like this:
❌ Lock your assets in a smart contract
❌ Mint a wrapped version on another chain
❌ Trust a validator, oracle, or relayer to make it all work
That’s a lot of moving parts, and a lot of risk.
In 2022 alone, bridge hacks cost users over $2.5B.
Wormhole, Ronin, Harmony, were the largest cases, but a whole bunch of smaller exploits happened too.
Why? Because the more centralized the trust is, the bigger the failure when things go wrong.
But what if cross-chain swaps didn’t need trust at all?
What if they didn’t need validators, relayers, or wrapped tokens too?
That’s exactly where 𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗰 𝘀𝘄𝗮𝗽𝘀 come in.
Powered by 𝗛𝗧𝗟𝗖𝘀 (Hashed Time-Locked Contracts), they’re the foundation of our tech stack.
HTLCs are simple but incredibly powerful:
Bookmark this Simplified & Explained quickie, but tomorrow we’ll dig into them deeper.
☑️ A cryptographic secret enforces fairness
☑️ timeout ensures no one can get rugged
☑️ If both sides complete, the swap happens. If not, assets are refunded—automatically.
TLDR: No middlemen. No custody. No drama.
Portal leverages HTLCs to enable native BTC <> ETH swaps (and other assets too) without giving up your keys or using bridges.
You stay in full control, always. This isn’t just theory. It’s shipping.
Instead of asking you to trust its validators, Portal eliminates the need for trust entirely.
No multisigs.
No wrapped assets.
No governance drama.
Just easy, cryptographically enforced swaps across chains.
Portal represents a whole new way of making swaps in DeFi:
From “bridge protocols” to 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆.
From complex smart contracts to 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗺𝗮𝗹, 𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀.
Cross-chain is finally becoming trustless 🙌
Like, Repost and 𝙎𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙩 𝙔𝙖𝙥𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙩𝙤 𝙗𝙤𝙤𝙨𝙩 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙨𝙤𝙘𝙞𝙖𝙡 𝙢𝙚𝙙𝙞𝙖 𝙞𝙣𝙛𝙡𝙪𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚!
Up tomorrow:
“𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝗻 𝗛𝗧𝗟𝗖, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗵𝘆 𝗶𝘁 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘀 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴.”
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