Canonical bridge

A holder of an asset on a chain asks who controls it and what mechanism and actor backs the balance. TVS, stages, the risk view, ossification and warnings each answer a part, together describing the full notion of ‘canonical’.

Backing

• Canonical: assets in an escrow that releases them only against the chain’s own state validation, through the chain’s messaging.
• External: assets whose release depends on another system’s validation.
• Native: assets whose main ledger is the chain itself.

Additional trust assumptions

The holder already trusts the core governance and the asset’s issuer. A party beyond that which can upgrade, pause, censor, limit, steal or invest a canonical escrow or its counterpart on the chain is an additional trust assumption.

The core

The core is the messaging bridge, the state validation, their governance and the canonical escrows without additional trust assumptions. Every score is assigned to the core: the Stage, the risk view, the ossification perimeter and the red warnings.