Why Glacis?

As the blockchain ecosystem evolves, the complexity, fragmentation, and security risks of cross-chain technology continues to grow. Glacis is built so that developers can decouple their applications from the underlying cross chain transport layer. This helps developers manage and control cross chain risks.

Let’s take a deeper look:

Abstraction

Building your cross-chain dApp with Glacis will significantly reduce the risk you take when choosing a GMP provider. With Glacis, you have the ability to choose the GMP(s) through which your messages are sent at any time. Being able to change your GMPs at any time with no developer interface changes is helpful in cases where a GMP has a service outage, security issue or unexpected change in terms of use to ensure continuity of your application.

Access Control

All Glacis-powered smart contracts must have access control enabled within them to simulate a secure firewall. This allows developers to granularly determine which smart contracts, which chains, and which GMP services they trust. Glacis provides the GlacisClient base smart contract for developers to help with access control.

Redundancy

Through a redundancy and quorum system, Glacis allows a single cross-chain message to be sent through multiple GMPs. This can increase speed and reliability when accepting execution upon receiving a message from 1 GMP out of n, but also significantly increase security by increasing message quorum (x GMP out of n).

Retry Management

Occasionally, GMP protocols can be finicky as the infrastructure continues to develop. Oracles, GMP consensus, relayers: there are many points of failure and messages can be easily lost at multiple spots along the way. Glacis allows identical messages (with the same message ID) to be resent from the original smart contracts. This is more secure than simply sending an additional message, since lost messages that are found again can be used in replay attacks. With Glacis, a successful secondary message will nullify the previous message and vice-versa.

Intelligent Routing

Glacis provides applications with the capability to intelligently route messages based on their importance or value. High-value messages, which may include, high economic value, critical alerts, urgent updates, or sensitive information, can be routed through one GMP equipped with advanced features such as enhanced security protocols, priority queuing, and robust error-handling mechanisms. Conversely, low-value messages, which might consist of routine updates, non-urgent notifications, or general information, can be directed through an alternative messaging pathway that is optimized for cost-effectiveness and scalability, rather than speed or security.

Concepts

• GMP — stands for "General Message Passing", and loosely refers to the protocols that provide the service. GMP is general because the messages have any type of encoded data within them, not just token bridging.

• Message ID — each message sent by Glacis has its own message ID, which is determined by the content of the message, its owner, and a nonce.

• Adapters — each GMP protocol that Glacis supports has its own adapter smart contract, which communicates to and for the GlacisRouter.