A trio of researchers has presented a new way of bridging Dogecoin to Ethereum. Their work has broader implications for decentralization.
Since the dawn of Ethereum, developers and researchers have searched for the Shangri-La of crypto. No, not scaling the blockchain. No, not the Spankchain afterparty[1] at Devcon. I'm talking, of course, about Dogethereum, the fabled bridge between Dogecoin and Ethereum.
Though Dogecoin began as a joke, the pursuit of a bridge between Dogecoin and Ethereum presents a legitimate technical challenge. Vitalik Buterin estimated that verifying Dogecoin via proof of work would require 370 million gas and 118 transactions.
A trio of researchers has sought to resolve that inefficiency – and not just because there's a bounty worth more than $100,000 to find a way to securely transfer Dogecoin to the Ethereum blockchain.
In a recently released research paper titled "Retrofitting a Two-Way Peg Between Blockchains,"[2] Jason Teutsch, founder of Truebit, an open-source community working on cryptoeconomic protocols, along with Stanford researchers Dan Boneh and Michael Straka, present their method for realizing Dogethereum. In it, they recognize they're not the only ones working on the project. The paper works in part like a history of the project:
"The construction presented here includes many ideas that others have shared over the years which concretely combine into a cohesive tour-de-force. Both the history and technical developments of Dogethereum are integral to the foundations of blockchain, yet available literature has been scattered. This paper aims to be a self-contained exposition on the current state of affairs and a launching point for those who are interested in exploring further."
Teutsch, Boneh, and Straka themselves lay out three contibutions: Truebit, bulletproofs, and "parametrized tokens."
First, Truebit. Teutsch, the figure who partnered with Vitalik Buterin to write the
