The MIMIR B2i Bridge: The Ease of a Web API, The Power of a Node

The MIMIR Blockchain to Internet (B2i) Bridge offers secure blockchain access that is fundamentally different than traditional Web APIs and BaaS providers. We set out to give users secure access to Dapps while minimizing the costs of providing this infrastructure. Web APIs/BaaS are centralized service providers that tend to have high operational costs due to network usage, storage, and computation. By crowdsourcing our infrastructure, we add revenue for public nodes, help decentralized businesses reach a larger audience, improve network security by supporting archival nodes, and provide end users with seamless secure blockchain access.

What’s Missing From Current Remote API/BaaS
These are services like Infura and Blockcypher. Almost every blockchain user has interacted with their services at some time and may not even realize it. Unfortunately, even if you didn’t realize you were using them, you were giving up some of the security offered by the blockchain. When interacting with a blockchain service through a local node, you can be confident the information being provided has been verified by the consensus protocol. When a third-party provider is used, your device no longer has the benefit of being able to verify the consensus protocol. This means that you are trusting the server (read, a centralized source of truth) to be honest. Blockchains were built so that untrusted parties could exchange value and information without relying on any central authority.

Decentralized
A decentralized system is, quite simply, a system with no single point of failure. In a decentralized system, the storage/computation is performed across many machines (or nodes) instead of only one. The benefit of decentralization is if one of those nodes were to fail, or become malicious, the rest of system would be fine. MIMIR built the B2i Bridge to preserve these characteristics, even if you are not running a node. We do this by using existing nodes as a decentralized server farm. When you pass a message through the MIMIR Bridge, it is answered by multiple nodes that enforce honesty on each other. We play referee, and make sure no one is trying to abuse the system, but we don’t serve any data about the blockchain. This is how we keep our system decentralized. Simply being decentralized isn’t enough, you also need a means to keep everyone honest. In order to keep everyone playing nice, we have both a carrot and a stick. The stick comes in the form of economic punishment for bad actions. In order to punish, we must all be able to agree what is true and false. Thats where consensus comes in.

Trustless Consensus
Trustless consensus may sound like the absence of trust, but it is actually the distribution of trust. Why put faith in a single entity to be honest when you can put faith in a group of entities who all have a stake in maintaining the integrity of the system?

The MIMIR Bridge, was engineered to ensure the benefits of a malicious act were always less than the benefits of honest participants. In order to catch those malicious parties before any harm is done, we designed the MIMIR Bridge to protect the user from bad actors through arbitrary recursive verification. This means the user can set what level of security they want by asking for more and more confirmation about the information provided. Each layer of consensus diminishes the potential value of a malicious act (by dividing between more individuals) and is another opportunity for a malicious actor to be caught. Each layer also means an even greater reward (the sum of all of the malicious actors’ forfeited stake) for the single honest participant who informs the user of a malicious act.

Distributed Verification
In order to make sure our system was resilient to malicious parties, no one person is responsible for determining the validity of a request. The verification of every request gets split between a group of individuals to ensure that malicious parties are caught before they cause damage. In order to stop malicious coordination the MIMIR bridge utilizes a secure routing protocol. This protocol prevents anyone from knowing who will be checking their work. The routing protocol was also designed so that it could be easily verified by a mobile device. MIMIR built the system so that third parties could easily double check our work. We made the system operate so that even if MIMIR itself became malicious (due to being compromised or impersonated) it would be readily knowable. Trust no one and verify everything. That is the blockchain way.

Fault Tolerant
Fault-tolerant systems continue proper function even if a portion of that system is down for maintenance, unresponsive, or under attack. Fault tolerance allows for a system to bend but not break. The MIMIR Bridge is fault tolerant in the most traditional sense. We run redundant infrastructure that links against the pool of public nodes. This means that downtime can be avoided for both businesses and users. It also means that an unexpected spike in traffic won’t shut our system down.

Leverages Existing Infrastructure
MIMIR utilizes existing systems wherever possible. For instance, we built our core technology on the Ethereum blockchain, we rely on public nodes to provide our infrastructure, and we didn’t build our own blockchain for the MIMIR B2i Bridge. We designed the MIMIR Bridge to lean on established infrastructure that has proven itself as secure. Those choices haven’t limited us though; In the future, we will use our technology to allow users to interact with other blockchains as well. We can provide secure access to any blockchain with deterministic Turing complete smart contracts.

What Local Nodes Lack
Make no mistake, local nodes are the single best manner to interact with a blockchain. It doesn’t matter if you are running Geth, Parity, or any of the other software clients, they are all more secure than third party systems. Unfortunately, this software requires a desktop or laptop computer to run. This software also needs secure high speed internet access to sync blockchain data. In order to create a secure, mobile friendly alternative, we built the MIMIR B2i Bridge.

Mobile Friendly
We aim to close the gap between the users and dedicated coders by providing a secure transparent communication channel that allows developers to focus on making better UI/UX. Developing for blockchains is hard. Building secure blockchain software for mobile devices is even harder. The MIMIR Bridge provides a simple solution that can instantly link a mobile device into blockchain services without draining the battery or eating up the data plan.

IoT Friendly
IoT (Internet of Things) devices are important to MIMIR. We believe that, regardless of the platform, our software should be able to provide secure blockchain access. This is why we have written most of our codebase in Rust. Blockchains could provide a mechanism for verified firmware updates, authenticated peer discovery for mesh networks, and even act as a new type of Public Key Infrastructure. To put it more simply, secure blockchain access could help keep the tech in your car, your refrigerator, or your remote webcam doing what they were intended to do These devices also won’t be stealing your credit card information or allowing hackers to spy on your family. We aren’t fundamentally changing any of these IoT platforms. What we’re doing is creating a way for them to all play nice with the blockchain.

User Friendly
Honestly, end-users shouldn’t even know you’re using our software. We act transparently to existing UI/UX solutions like Metamask, and we are building our software to work on a variety of devices. Our goal is to provide seamless and secure interaction with blockchain services, Dapps, and mobile wallets regardless of your platform of choice.

Instantly Accessible
The Ethereum blockchain can have multi-hour wait times to download/synchronise with the system. MIMIR relies on existing nodes from the Ethereum ecosystem to provide instant access — no sync time required. The MIMIR B2i Bridge provides users with full node access without the hassle of partial information you get with light clients or the required file size to host an actual node.

This also greatly contrasts with light client protocols. Though the most often used Data is readily available, once a request is made that is outside the reach of the light client, you are forced to download the entire associated database. This makes light clients an imperfect compromise as they are too large for edge-connected devices to operate with smoothly and too small to maintain the full security of a blockchain node.

Conclusion
With the MIMIR B2i Bridge, our goal, first and foremost, is to bring blockchain to the offchain. This means simplifying the process of accessing a blockchain without losing any of its benefits. It allows for a more efficient peer-to-peer economy to emerge with better securities. The MIMIR B2i Bridge also enforces economic security and provides secure information to end users. We envision the MIMIR B2i Bridge will someday be utilized on a variety of blockchains, connecting users seamlessly through our software.

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