In the cross-chain track, Socket has chosen to be the infrastructure for service developers to build cross-chain applications.
Author: Joyce
Editor: Jaleel
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In the cryptocurrency ecosystem, new L2 and Rollup solutions are constantly emerging, accompanied by an increasing fragmentation of liquidity. At least for now and the foreseeable future, cross-chain solutions are indispensable participants in the multi-chain world.
In the fierce and homogenizing competition of the cross-chain track, focusing on interoperability and providing more personalized cross-chain services may be a direction worth paying attention to. For example, Poly Network, a veteran cross-chain protocol, provides a comprehensive cross-chain solution that is somewhat similar to Cosmos Hub. It can connect multiple blockchain networks, and its current transaction volume has exceeded $1.67 billion, with a TVL of over $81.31 million.
Related reading: “Becoming the Largest ‘Water Seller’ in a Multi-Chain World, How Will the Narrative of the Cross-Chain Track Continue in the Second Half?”
In addition to this, Socket, which has raised $5 million in funding and has received investment from Coinbase Ventures and Framework Ventures, also provides a new approach for the cross-chain track. Socket does not choose to be a bridge or a cross-chain application, but rather an infrastructure for service developers to build cross-chain applications.
Since its launch in November 2021, Socket has facilitated over 2.5 million cross-chain transactions on 15 chains, serving more than 80 protocols and dApps, with a total transaction volume of $3.5 billion. It covers areas such as software and hardware wallets, browsers, and DeFi, including mainstream wallets such as Coinbase Wallet, Coinbase, and MetaMask. What is the architecture of Socket? What advantages have contributed to its relatively smooth development? Apart from developers, does Socket have other directions in its layout? Blockbeats provides an overview in this article.
Socket Protocol: Developer-friendly interoperable infrastructure
Socket is an interoperability protocol infrastructure for cross-chain data and asset transfer, aiming to provide secure, efficient, and seamless asset and data transfer for cross-blockchain protocols and dApps.
Its feature is that developers can use Socket to build interoperable products with different targets and trade-offs, providing a seamless multi-chain experience for users of applications. Developers can add cross-chain asset transfer and data transfer functionality to their applications by calling APIs, or they can directly use pre-packaged cross-chain functional modules and tools.
According to the official documentation, the seamless transfer of cross-chain data and assets is achieved through two key components of Socket: SocketLL (Liquidity Layer) and SocketDL (Data Layer).
Key Components: SocketLL and SocketDL
SocketLL unifies cross-chain liquidity by aggregating asset bridges and DEXs, and dynamically selects the best bridging mechanism based on developers’ preferences, such as cost, latency, or security, to achieve seamless and efficient cross-chain asset transfers.
Socket’s on-chain contracts and optional off-chain backend quoting engine and API together support the user’s token bridging process. The backend quoting engine determines the best possible route between given token chains by utilizing liquidity data from DEXs and bridges. The Socket LL API supports the frontend data flow, generating bridging routes and transaction data for bridging. SocketLL’s smart contracts aggregate all DEXs and bridges into a single function call route. Users can exchange + bridge tokens with just one click.
In addition, Socket has developed a centralized solution called Refuel to ensure that users can always get gas on any chain they need, avoiding the problem of not having native tokens to execute transactions when performing token cross-chain transfers. Refuel can be used within the bridging process itself, allowing users to receive native tokens as well as bridged assets on the target chain, or as a bridge for moving a small amount of native tokens.
In addition to SocketLL, there is another key component called SocketDL.
SocketDL unifies chains by connecting all smart contracts on all chains, allowing them to perform read and write operations on each other. This supports the implementation of secure cross-chain data transfer. Through SocketDL, smart contracts can read states and communicate arbitrarily with other contracts on different chains. For example, a protocol on Polygon can read the APY of Aave on Arbitrum, or a protocol on Fantom can deposit funds into Aave on Optimism through Socket.
Team operation mechanism: Security expert community and OP Rush program
It is worth mentioning that Socket has formed a security expert community called SocketSentinels, with community members divided into three levels based on their abilities and contributions to Socket. Different levels will receive different privileges. Socket states on its official website that “members who play a key role in Socket governance and all security work will receive 5% of any future Socket tokens allocated to this and other similar security programs.”
In May, Socket held “SOCKET SURGE” to recruit hackers to conduct security audits on the SocketDL testnet. Socket implanted “Easter eggs” to identify potential collaborators and stated that “people in the blockchain security community who demonstrate obvious security intentions will receive airdrops of SurgeLianGuaiss NFT.” Outstanding participants will be invited to join SocketSentinels. Contributions in the event were scored using SurgePoints, and Socket invested $77,000 into the Lootbox over 4 weeks. A total of 14,000 people participated in the registration and discovered 15 system bugs.
Socket’s current popularity is also partly due to its comprehensive operational strategy. On August 2nd, Socket launched the OP Rush program, which allows users who use Bungee and other dApps/wallets supported by Socket to qualify for 90% of the bridging fees in the form of OP tokens when bridging to Optimism. The program lasted for 4 months, with a total distribution of 300k OP tokens.
The calculation formula for rewards is commission amount = 90% bridge fee + USD gas fee (based on the daily OP price), where the bridge fee = source amount (USD) – target amount (USD), and the maximum OP limit per transaction is 20, and the rewards obtained will be displayed on Bungee.
Within one month after the start of the event, users injected $150 million in liquidity into Optimism through Socket.
How to use Socket Bridge Aggregator Bungee
For ordinary users, the bridge aggregator Bungee built by Socket team can be directly used for single transaction bridging (the multi-transaction Bungee that supports multiple transactions is still in the testing phase). Bungee currently supports asset transactions between most mainstream chains, such as Arbitrum, Avalanche, Ethereum, Optimism, etc.
Enter Bungee and connect your wallet. Bungee supports mainstream wallets such as Metamask, Wallet Connect, Rainbow, and Coinbase.
Select the source chain and target chain, choose the assets to be bridged and enter the amount.
After entering the amount, the available routes will be displayed, and you can view the cost and required transaction time of each route. Select the appropriate route to proceed with the cross-chain asset transfer.
About Refuel
If there is not enough native tokens on the target chain as gas fees, you can use the Refuel function to exchange a small amount of bridged tokens from the source chain for native tokens on the target chain. The amount of tokens used as gas fees will be displayed in the interface.
For users who want to move a small amount of native tokens across chains, Refuel can also be used as an independent bridge. After selecting the source chain and target chain, Bungee will highlight the minimum and maximum limits of Refuel on the slider below.
After submitting the cross-chain asset transfer request, confirm the transaction in your wallet and wait for the transaction to be confirmed on the source chain. Users can search for the source transaction hash or target transaction hash on Socketscan to track the transaction status. When the transaction is marked as successful, users will be able to find the corresponding assets in the target address.
Expansion of cooperation with Coinbase after financing
The Socket team is composed of programmers and cross-chain enthusiasts. The official website shows that there are 20 members, and the co-founders are Vaibhav Chellani (formerly an engineer at Matic Network) and Rishabh Khurana.
Socket was formerly known as Movr Network. After changing its name to Socket in February last year, it completed a $5 million seed round of financing led by Framework Ventures in March. Subsequently, Socket launched the SocketLL function and the cross-chain transaction product Bungee. On September 7th, Socket completed a $5 million seed round of financing led by Framework Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and others. The new funds will expand Socket’s cooperation with Coinbase, including providing easy-to-use bridges for Coinbase Wallet and Base developers and users.
Currently, Socket allows users to choose acceptable slippage when using DEX or bridging protocols, and meets the needs of covering addresses in multi-order cross-chain trading centers. Socket claims that in the future, it will implement more user-friendly features, such as allowing users to perform more operations, including bridging, swapping, depositing xToken, borrowing yToken, etc. In addition, Socket will explore the implementation of splitting transactions among multiple bridging protocols to efficiently transfer liquidity between these different bridges in a single transaction.
Security score and robustness score are considerations made by Socket to ensure the secure transfer of assets. Assessing the security of bridging protocols or services exposed through SocketLL and assigning them a security score can help users or developers understand the security of specific bridging protocols or services and decide whether to perform asset transfers or other operations on them.
Robustness score refers to the difference between the actual bridging time of a specific bridging service and the reference time. If the difference between the actual bridging time and the reference time is small, the bridging service may be more stable and reliable, and vice versa. Evaluating robustness helps users or developers choose reliable bridging services to ensure smooth asset transfers.
Currently, Socket’s partners can charge fees during the asset transfer process. Socket plans to make its data more accessible and usable to facilitate various analyses by partners. Socket claims that it will explore more partnerships based on existing ecosystem partners.
Further reading:
Socket Protocol official documentation;
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