Connext and Cross-chain Interoperability Alliance Call for Open Bridge Standards

According to Foresight News, Layer2 interoperability protocol Connext has called for the establishment of open bridge standards in collaboration with Across, Celer Network, ChainSafe, Sygma, LI.FI, Socket, Router Protocol, and the Cross-chain Interoperability Alliance. The initiative expresses concern over LayerZero's recent actions, which deployed wstETH to Avalanche, BNN Chain, and Scroll without the support of Lido DAO. The group believes that:1) Proprietary standards locked by vendors are not true standards. While OFT and other vendor-specific systems are marketed as standards, they are fundamentally owned by the cross-chain bridges that implement them. They enforce vendor lock-in, making it nearly impossible for projects to iterate on preferences, address security risks, or switch to another option permanently.2) Lock-in introduces systemic risks. Tokens issued through proprietary standards are forever tied to the security model of the issuing bridge. Lock-in hinders positive iteration on security, bringing unquantifiable systemic risks to projects. Over the past two years, cross-chain bridges have suffered hacker attacks worth more than $2 billion due to these systemic risks.3) Token issuers should own their tokens. Token-issuing DAOs should be the ultimate arbiters of their assets' canonical versions on specific chains. Fragmentation is driven by issuing multiple non-fungible representations if a canonical representation of a particular asset cannot be determined without DAO-led social consensus.4) Provider-agnostic open standards encourage healthy competition. Open public standards like ElP-7281 (xERC20) allow token issuers to adopt canonical representations in accordance with point 3 while avoiding lock-in as per point 2, rewriting the incentive structure around token bridging security. Standards drive open, ongoing competition among bridging providers in terms of pricing, uptime, and security. This encourages continuous innovation around secure bridging approaches, ultimately benefiting users.