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Despite DeFi's tremendous growth, security remains its Achilles' heel. Current approaches like audits, bug bounties, and automated monitoring have proven insufficient against sophisticated attackers. Even when vulnerabilities are discovered, the race between whitehats and blackhats often ends in costly exploits.
We recently announced the Credible Layer Whitepaper, and in this blog post, we will provide a quick overview of some of its key points. Not everyone has the time to read +50 pages afterall.
Current security solutions face several critical limitations:
We need a new approach that guarantees deterministic security without relying on probabilistic detection or reaction speeds.
The Credible Layer introduces a novel security primitive: Assertions. Instead of trying to enumerate and protect against all possible attack vectors, protocols define what states should never occur.
An assertion is a function that maps blockchain state to a boolean value:
Assertion: State → {true, false}
For example, assertions could specify that:
These assertions are executed off-chain in a modified EVM (PhEVM), allowing for complex checks that would be impractical or impossible to perform on-chain.
While the blockchain space has recently embraced intents as a way to express desired outcomes, assertions can be viewed as their inverse - a sort of “negative intent" that specifies states that must never occur. This shift from prescriptive to proscriptive specification offers a powerful security abstraction. Rather than trying to enumerate all valid states or anticipate every possible attack vector, developers can declaratively define what constitutes an invalid state for their protocol. This approach is particularly powerful for security implementations, as it protects against both known and unknown vulnerabilities.
Whether an attacker exploits a code vulnerability, compromised private keys, or even compiler-level bugs, a well-crafted assertion can prevent the system from entering an invalid state. By focusing on what must not happen rather than exhaustively defining what can happen, assertions provide a more flexible and comprehensive security model that naturally scales with protocol complexity.
A crucial advantage of the Credible Layer's design is that assertions exist outside the protocol’s smart contract code. Unlike traditional security measures that require contract modifications and redeployment, assertions can be added or removed without touching the underlying protocol contracts. They simply point to the contract themselves to tell the base layer which contract to apply which rules to. This separation provides flexibility in managing protocol security. Teams can react to newly discovered attack vectors by deploying new assertions immediately, without the risks and coordination challenges of contract upgrades. Similarly, if an assertion proves too restrictive or unuseful, it can be quickly removed without affecting protocol operations. By decoupling security rules from protocol contract code, protocols can maintain robust, adaptable security without sacrificing immutable contracts' stability and reliability benefits.
The Credible Layer involves four key participants:
The system's security relies on both economic and social incentives:
While an attacker might theoretically offer bribes exceeding the staked bonds, the combination of economic penalties and social consequences creates a powerful deterrent. Additionally, all the entities we work with are already trusted to select and order which blocks are included. In other words, we are not giving them any more power to enable hacks than they already have.
Our first implementation, Ajax, is designed for OP Stack-based rollups and comprised of several key components:
The system is designed to eventually work in both centralized and decentralized environments as our goal is to protect capital and users wherever they may be:
The Credible Layer's architecture extends to decentralized environments with multiple block builders, such as the Ethereum mainnet. The system maintains a registry of "Credible Builders" - block builders who have enrolled as Assertion Enforcers and are committed to enforcing protocol assertions. Protocols can then implement checks that reject transactions from non-credible builders, effectively ensuring their security guarantees remain intact regardless of the network's builder landscape. This creates a natural competitive advantage for participating builders, who can attract protocol activity through their security guarantees while also earning security fees. The system even supports "Credible Bundles" for application-specific sequencing, allowing for fine-grained security enforcement at the transaction bundle level rather than entire blocks. This flexibility ensures the Credible Layer can adapt to various network architectures while maintaining its security properties.
The Credible Layer's vision extends beyond single-network security to support assertions spanning multiple networks, creating a unified security layer across L1s and L2s with standardized proof formats and verification. Cross-chain assertions are crucial as DeFi increasingly operates across multiple networks, where vulnerabilities in one network can cascade into others.
For instance, a bridge exploit on one chain could trigger assertions on connected networks, preventing the attacker from withdrawing or using the stolen funds across the ecosystem. This becomes particularly powerful for protocols operating across multiple chains, allowing them to define security invariants that span their entire system rather than treating each deployment in isolation.
Such cross-chain security guarantees are increasingly vital as protocols deploy across numerous L2s and bridges become critical infrastructure, making ecosystem-wide security coordination essential for preventing sophisticated attacks that exploit cross-chain interactions.
The Credible Layer enables several novel financial primitives that were previously impractical due to blockchain's inherent difficulty in quantifying risk and defining adverse events:
These primitives represent more than just financial products - they're tools that become possible when we can programmatically define and verify security conditions. By making security quantifiable and verifiable, the Credible Layer opens up an entirely new design space for DeFi primitives that previously couldn't exist due to the difficulty of expressing and verifying security assumptions on-chain.
While we're starting with hack prevention, the Credible Layer creates possibilities for new applications and paradigms:
We're actively working with L2 networks on initial implementations. Looking ahead, we're focused on:
The Credible Layer represents a fundamental shift in blockchain security. Instead of reacting to attacks, we're creating an environment where hacks are prevented by the underlying infrastructure.
If you have any questions about the Credible Layer or the whitepaper in general, please join our Discourse and join the discussion.
If you're interested in integrating the Credible Layer or contributing to its development, join our Telegram chat.
