Bridges are an important part of the crypto landscape to provide liquidity and integration between crypto ecosystems such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Cardano. Historically though, bridges have suffered from insecure and centralised implementations with a long history of compromise by threat actors.
A new bridge between Cardano and Ergo (simplistically a PoW partner of Cardano) plans to change this with a highly secure and decentralised implementation. The architecture uses watchers who are responsible to monitor transactions on chains that will be bridged, and guards who will store funds and transact based on the information provided by the watchers on each chain.
The first chains will be Cardano and Ergo with the roadmap set to include Ethereum, Bitcoin and Dogecoin in the following phases. The Rosen1 Bridge design will permit value to be transferred or directly from Bitcoin to Cardano for example, without needing to be converted to an intermediate token such as Ergo.
Initial uptake looks very positive with the RSN token already showing a significant increase in price along with ERG, both of which are needed to operate watchers. There are already more than 80 watchers on Cardano and Ergo sides of the bridge which bodes well for a successful launch in the coming months.
In the longer term Rosen Bridge has the potential to bring significant additional liquidity into the Cardano and Ergo ecosystems. It could also change the bridge landscape in time, assuming the implementation delivers the security and decentralisation benefits promised.
More information is available from https://rosen.tech.
1 If you are curious where the name for the bridge comes from then check out this article on Wormholes.
Einstein–Rosen bridges, also known as EPR=KOI bridges[17] (named after Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen),[18] are connections between areas of space that can be modeled as vacuum solutions to the Einstein field equations, and that are now understood to be intrinsic parts of the maximally extended version of the Schwarzschild metric describing an eternal black hole with no charge and no rotation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole