IBC Bridging Layer

IBC is a multisig bridging layer in between all CosmosSDK chains. IBC is a vital component of Pulsar, since it allows the restake chain design. Moreover, it makes using any IBC tokens possible on Pulsar. However, there is another benefit of IBC to Pulsar.

As said before, Pulsar is a succinct chain. This means that the Pulsar’s own validator set has no synchronization duration and full node verification is quite lightweight, improving the overall decentralization. However, this succinctness is not proper to Pulsar actually, and through IBC all Cosmos chains can also benefit from this advantage.

Specifically, IBC is a technology that enables the two-way syncing of two CometBFT mechanisms on each other. Through IBC relayer nodes, two different active sets track the changes on the other with minimal delay.

This means that any IBC network’s validator set is known by Pulsar at each block, so the succinct verification of another chain is possible through the succinct verification of Pulsar’s validator set. Of course, this introduces Pulsar’s economical security as a trust assumption, since in a case where the Pulsar chain is broken, the other chain’s set can also be served untruthfully. Nevertheless, for AtomOne this is no problem, since Pulsar’s validator set is the same as AtomOne’s! This means that Pulsar makes AtomOne perfectly succinct as well as its own setup.

For other IBC chains, trusting the Pulsar validator set is definitely an improvement over the existing setup. The AtomOne’s set is already more decentralized than many other Cosmos chains, and it is for sure much better than trusting a single RPC provider or snapshot (i.e. an already synced central view of the chain).