Gnosis Unveils Hashi Bridge Aggregator, Designed to Reduce the Risk of Hacks

Hashi Bridge Aggregator by Gnosis enhances DeFi security by connecting different blockchain networks, enabling safer and efficient transactions.
According to an announcement by the company, Gnosis, known for its Gnosis Safe multi-sig and Gnosis Chain, has released a hash oracle aggregator for blockchain bridges. In an interview with Cointelegraph, the CEO of Gnosis, Martin Köppelmann, explained that the new aggregator will enhance bridge security by mandating more than one bridge to authenticate a withdrawal before confirming it.
The announcement states that several bridge protocols, such as DendrETH, Succinct Labs, ZK Collective, Connext, Celer, LayerZero, Axiom, Wormhole and LI.FI, have expressed their intention to incorporate Hashi.
Token Terminal's report indicates that more than $2 billion was looted from bridges in 2021 and 2022, with some bridge hacks resulting from glitches in the code, while others were due to attackers gaining control of a multi-sig governance wallet.
Köppelmann has suggested that Hashi has the potential to be the initial stage in enhancing the security of cross-chain transactions throughout the blockchain ecosystem. This can be achieved by making sure that multiple bridges verify withdrawals, instead of relying on just one.
“Hashi is about essentially creating this aggregator that can use different bridges and basically say they all need to agree to the same message [...] If they do, great, then we can be really, really certain that this message is actually real and if they disagree [...] Then we know we need to escalate to governance, we need to halt the bridge.”
Köppelmann has highlighted that Hashi can aid in preventing multi-sig governance attacks, as it enables a protocol to prohibit governance interference if there is no discrepancy between the individual bridges.
According to Köppelmann, with Hashi, a beneficial tradeoff can be achieved by imposing restrictions on governance, ensuring that it does not interfere with the system unless there is a conflict or a bug. He explained that if the bridges, which are expected to report the same information, are in agreement, governance cannot intervene. However, governance can intervene if there is a disagreement between these bridges. This is the basic idea behind Hashi.
Hashi is open-source software that can be found on GitHub.
The concept of a multi-bridge aggregator was brought to the forefront during the Uniswap bridge discussion in December and January. Even though Wormhole was selected as Uniswap's bridge provider, several stakeholders, including representatives from Celer, LiFi, and deBridge, concluded that a multi-bridge aggregation solution was necessary for future implementations.