Reef Bridge Development Update - Nov 2024

Hello Reefians! We have a wonderful update for you, just in time for American Thanksgiving. We are giving thanks to the fantastic team at VIA Labs who have been hard at work incorporate Reef Chain into a variety of their products, and preparing to launch the testnet and, eventually, mainnet.

• VIA Labs has successfully deployed and configured both the cross-chain gateway contracts and the validator code onto Reef Chain.

• They can successfully generate a cross-chain message from Reef to all EVM chains in the VIA Network, and back to Reef Chain again!

• The final steps to update the validator code to properly receive a message from Reef -> Ethereum is coming next.

• VIA Labs' front-end development team has started on the Token Bridge UI and has made good progress.

• The testnet deployment of the bridge with working buttons for users to test will be ready soon.

• VIA Labs will need our co-operation to complete the mainnet deployment for the token bridge. The contract on Reef Chain mainnet will be seeded with $REEF to cover the $REEF bridged from Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain, allowing the bridge to function in a burn ➔ release functionality.

• On Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain, the plan is to have the $REEF tokens be locked into the smart contract and for Reef to be given a burn() command to burn them when ready. There will also be a retrieve() command, which we do not intend to use unless someone known to the team and community accidentally sends a large amount of $REEF to the contract instead of using the bridge in the manner intended.

• Based on VIA Labs' recent efforts and investigations, they have noted that this will require less effort than previously anticipated.

• Work has started on Proto-CCTP, the first step towards having a wrapped USDC deployment on Reef Chain that's compatible with Circle's official deployments on other networks.

As is often the case, a "go live" date is not being shared at this time to allow VIA Labs to completely the work properly, instead of feeling rushed. The work is well on track, though, and will launch as soon as we have all the prerequisites in place.

To celebrate all of these milestones being reached, we're holding a special video AMA with Cletus, Chief Operations Officer at VIA Labs! It will be live streamed on Reef Chain's YouTube, X and Facebook accounts. You can submit your own question now via Gleam.