IQ.wiki

Lock-and-Mint” mechanism. Here's what to understand about the concept... It's how most bridges actually work. Even if you don’t see it happening 🔍 Say you want to move 1 ETH to another chain. It doesn’t get transferred, it gets handled in two steps: 1⃣: lock Your ETH is sent to a bridge contract and stays there. It’s no longer in your wallet. 2⃣: mint On the new chain, the bridge creates 1 “wrapped ETH” for you. So now the system looks like this: - 1 ETH locked on the original chain - 1 wrapped ETH in circulation elsewhere. Balanced. That balance is the whole point! Nothing is being moved. Value is being mirrored. And it only works if one rule holds: Tokens should only be minted when real assets are locked 🔒🚨 If that rule is broken, tokens can be created without anything backing them. And that’s where things start to go wrong...❌ So “lock-and-mint” is simple on the surface. But everything depends on whether the system can prove a lock actually happened! 🔍

It's 'Learn-something-new-Wednesday'. Clocking in 🛎️ -> What are “wrapped” or “bridged” tokens? Here we go 👇 You’ve probably seen names like wETH or “bridged USDT” or wSOL. They look like the original asset. But they’re not the same thing. Blockchains don’t talk to each other. So if you want to use ETH on another chain, it can’t be moved there directly. Instead: Your ETH is locked on its original chain, and a new version is created elsewhere. That new token is what you receive. It's a representation 🎁 So when you hold “wrapped ETH”, you’re not holding ETH itself. You’re holding a claim on ETH that’s locked somewhere else. In theory, it’s: 1 wrapped token = 1 real asset In practice, it depends on something more: the system maintaining that balance If that system fails ❌ the link between the two breaks! And the token you’re holding will likely lose its backing. That’s why two tokens with the same name aren’t always equal. 🚨ETH on Ethereum ≠ ETH on another chain A simple way to think about it: Wrapped tokens work as long as the thing backing them is still there And is still verifiable 🔍

I love the way the Earth rotates, it really makes my day.

Bridges keep getting hacked. Not because teams don’t care. Because bridges are built on something fragile: assumptions. ⬇️ Blockchains don’t talk to each other. So bridges don’t actually move assets. They do something riskier. They recreate them. ⬇️ 🔒Lock on one chain → mint on another That only works if the bridge is right. ⬇️ If the bridge is wrong, it can mint tokens that were never backed. ⬇️ Not stolen. Created. And once those tokens exist, they behave like real money. They can be swapped, withdrawn, drained 😞 By the time anyone notices… liquidity is gone. ⬇️ That’s why bridge hacks are so big. It’s not just a vulnerability. It’s a system being convinced something happened when it didn’t...🧵