Empire

This is a collection of components for building empires using bridges.

These components include Tetcore pallets for syncing headers, passing arbitrary messages, as well as libraries for building relayers to provide cross-chain communication capabilities.

Three bridge nodes are also available. The nodes can be used to run test networks which bridge other Tetcore chains or Ethereum Proof-of-Authority chains.

🚧 The bridges are currently under construction - a hardhat is recommended beyond this point 🚧

Contents

• Installation
• High-Level Architecture
• Project Layout
• Running the Bridge
• Community

Installation

To get up and running you need both stable and nightly Rust. Rust nightly is used to build the Web Assembly (WASM) runtime for the node. You can configure the WASM support as so:

rustup install nightly
rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown --toolchain nightly

Once this is configured you can build and test the repo as follows:

git clone https://github.com/paritytech/parity-bridges-common.git
cd parity-bridges-common
cargo build --all
cargo test --all

If you need more information about setting up your development environment Substrate's Getting Started page is a good resource.

High-Level Architecture

This repo has support for bridging foreign chains together using a combination of Substrate pallets and external processes called relayers. A bridge chain is one that is able to follow the consensus of a foreign chain independently. For example, consider the case below where we want to bridge two Substrate based chains.

+---------------+                 +---------------+
|               |                 |               |
|     Rialto    |                 |    Millau     |
|               |                 |               |
+-------+-------+                 +-------+-------+
        ^                                 ^
        |       +---------------+         |
        |       |               |         |
        +-----> | Bridge Relay  | <-------+
                |               |
                +---------------+

The Millau chain must be able to accept Rialto headers and verify their integrity. It does this by using a runtime module designed to track GRANDPA finality. Since two blockchains can't interact directly they need an external service, called a relayer, to communicate. The relayer will subscribe to new Rialto headers via RPC and submit them to the Millau chain for verification.

Take a look at Bridge High Level Documentation for more in-depth description of the bridge interaction.

Project Layout

Here's an overview of how the project is laid out. The main bits are the node, which is the actual "blockchain", the modules which are used to build the blockchain's logic (a.k.a the runtime) and the relays which are used to pass messages between chains.

├── bin             // Node and Runtime for the various Substrate chains
│  └── ...
├── deployments     // Useful tools for deploying test networks
│  └──  ...
├── diagrams        // Pretty pictures of the project architecture
│  └──  ...
├── modules         // Substrate Runtime Modules (a.k.a Pallets)
│  ├── ethereum     // Ethereum PoA Header Sync Module
│  ├── substrate    // Substrate Based Chain Header Sync Module
│  ├── message-lane // Cross Chain Message Passing
│  └──  ...
├── primitives      // Code shared between modules, runtimes, and relays
│  └──  ...
├── relays          // Application for sending headers and messages between chains
│  └──  ...
└── scripts         // Useful development and maintenence scripts

Running the Bridge

To run the Bridge you need to be able to connect the bridge relay node to the RPC interface of nodes on each side of the bridge (source and target chain).

There are 3 ways to run the bridge, described below:

• building & running from source,
• building or using Docker images for each individual component,
• running a Docker Compose setup (recommended).

Using the Source

First you'll need to build the bridge nodes and relay. This can be done as follows:

# In `parity-bridges-common` folder
cargo build -p rialto-bridge-node
cargo build -p millau-bridge-node
cargo build -p substrate-relay

Running

To run a simple dev network you'll can use the scripts located in the deployments/local-scripts folder. Since the relayer connects to both Substrate chains it must be run last.

# In `parity-bridges-common` folder
./deployments/local-scripts/run-rialto-bridge-node.sh
./deployments/local-scripts/run-millau-bridge-node.sh
./deployments/local-scripts/relay-millau-to-rialto.sh

At this point you should see the relayer submitting headers from the Millau Substrate chain to the Rialto Substrate chain.

Local Docker Setup

To get up and running quickly you can use published Docker images for the bridge nodes and relayer. The images are published on Docker Hub.

To run the dev network we first run the two bridge nodes:

docker run -p 30333:30333 -p 9933:9933 -p 9944:9944 \
           -it paritytech/rialto-bridge-node --dev --tmp \
           --rpc-cors=all --unsafe-rpc-external --unsafe-ws-external

docker run -p 30334:30333 -p 9934:9933 -p 9945:9944 \
           -it paritytech/millau-bridge-node --dev --tmp \
           --rpc-cors=all --unsafe-rpc-external --unsafe-ws-external

Notice that the docker run command will accept all the normal Substrate flags. For local development you should at minimum run with the --dev flag or else no blocks will be produced.

Then we need to initialize and run the relayer:

docker run --network=host -it \
        paritytech/substrate-relay initialize-rialto-headers-bridge-in-millau \
        --millau-host localhost \
        --millau-port 9945 \
        --rialto-host localhost \
        --rialto-port 9944 \
        --millau-signer //Alice

docker run --network=host -it \
        paritytech/substrate-relay rialto-headers-to-millau \
        --millau-host localhost \
        --millau-port 9945 \
        --rialto-host localhost \
        --rialto-port 9944 \
        --millau-signer //Bob \

You should now see the relayer submitting headers from the Millau chain to the Rialto chain.

If you don't want to use the published Docker images you can build images yourself. You can do this by running the following commands at the top level of the repository.

# In `parity-bridges-common` folder
docker build . -t local/rialto-bridge-node --build-arg PROJECT=rialto-bridge-node
docker build . -t local/millau-bridge-node --build-arg PROJECT=millau-bridge-node
docker build . -t local/substrate-relay --build-arg PROJECT=substrate-relay

Note: Building the node images will take a long time, so make sure you have some coffee handy.

Once you have the images built you can use them in the previous commands by replacing paritytech/<component_name> with local/<component_name> everywhere.

Full Network Docker Compose Setup

For a more sophisticated deployment which includes bidirectional header sync, message passing, monitoring dashboards, etc. see the Deployments README.

Community

Main hangout for the community is Element (formerly Riot). Element is a chat server like, for example, Discord. Most discussions around Polkadot and Substrate happen in various Element "rooms" (channels). So, joining Element might be a good idea, anyway.

If you are interested in information exchange and development of Polkadot related bridges please feel free to join the Polkadot Bridges Element channel.

The Substrate Technical Element channel is most suited for discussions regarding Substrate itself.