Nomad Docs
  • Nomad 101
    • Funds Recovery
    • Introduction
    • Our Mission
    • Getting Started
  • The Nomad Protocol
    • Overview
    • Cross-chain Messaging
      • Lifecycle of a Message
    • Verification Mechanisms
      • Background on Verification
      • Native Verification
      • External Verification
      • Optimistic Verification
      • Comparing Mechanisms
    • Security
      • Root of Trust
        • Fraud
          • Optimistic Timeout Period
          • Fraud Recovery
        • App-Governed Root of Trust
        • Liveness Assumptions
      • Attack Vectors
        • Key Compromise
        • Economic Attacks
        • Smart Contract Bugs
      • Long-Term Security
        • Permissionless Watchers
        • Financial Controls
        • Cross-Domain MEV
    • Smart Contracts
      • Home
      • Replica
      • XAppConnectionManager
    • Off-chain Agents
      • Updater
      • Watchers
      • Relayer
      • Processor
  • Token Bridge
    • Overview
    • How to Bridge
      • Using Etherscan
      • Nomad Bridge App
      • Testnet Bridge App
    • Asset Issuers
      • Custom Representations
    • Deployed Tokens
      • Mainnet
      • Testnet
    • Smart Contracts
      • BridgeRouter
      • TokenRegistry
      • BridgeToken
      • BridgeMessage
    • Architecture
    • FAQ
  • Governance Bridge
    • Overview
    • Zodiac: Nomad Module
    • Smart Contracts
      • NomadModule
    • Architecture
  • Developers
    • Quickstart
      • Send Messages
      • Receive Messages
    • Environments
      • Domain (Chain) IDs
    • Application Developers
      • Building xApps
      • SDK
        • Contracts SDK
        • Typescript SDK
      • Examples
        • Ping Pong
        • Example Bridge GUI
        • xApp Example
      • Advanced
        • Router Pattern
    • Node Operators
      • Running Agents Guide
        • Troubleshooting
      • Running a Watcher
      • Agent Operations
      • Agent Gas Values
      • The Keymaster
    • Core Developers
      • Upgrade Setup
      • Deploying Contracts
        • Development
        • Production
  • Operational Security
    • Audits
    • Bug Bounty
    • Governance
    • Contracts
    • Agent Operations
  • Resources
    • Awesome Interoperability
    • Brand Kit
    • FAQ
    • Glossary
    • GitHub
    • Discord
    • Twitter
    • Website
Powered by GitBook
On this page
  • The Arc of the Internet
  • The Era of Ad-hoc Interoperability
  • The Future: Seamlessly Connected Chains
  1. Nomad 101

Our Mission

Why we are building Nomad, and the future we envision

PreviousIntroductionNextGetting Started

Last updated 2 years ago

The Nomad core team's mission is simple:

To enable value and information to flow securely between blockchains.

In service of this mission, we are building . Our goal is to ensure that all smart contract chains can interoperate using simple, gas-efficient, and trust-minimized standards.

The Arc of the Internet

We believe that crypto / web3 ushers in a new paradigm for computing, showing the way for a new internet model that minimizes capture and enables users to transact more freely.

Yet, this paradigm shift is in its infancy, and one of the major limitations right now stems from chains being siloed. This limits composability and standardization, preventing from being deployed and reaching a world-scale audience.

The good news is that we've seen this play out before.

As you can see on the map above, the various access points each corresponded to local university or research institute, which through ARPANET, became connected to each other via a common standard.

Until ARPANET, each access point or intranet was effectively siloed and required a separate interface to access. Bob Taylor, a director at APRA recollects the headaches involved:

Taylor recalls the circumstance: "For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So, if I was talking online with someone at S.D.C., and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley, or M.I.T., about this, I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them. I said, "Oh Man!", it's obvious what to do: If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go. That idea is the ARPANET".

To current crypto users, the experience described above is eerily reminiscent. This is because we are fundamentally in a similar era regarding the maturity of web3 infrastructure.

The Era of Ad-hoc Interoperability

To interact with an application on a new blockchain today, many users must determine which chain the app is deployed on, withdraw funds from existing on-chain positions on a different chain, bridge their funds over to the new chain, change their wallet RPC connection, and then interact with the application. This is obviously far from an ideal user experience.

As a result of this complexity, many have opined that cross-chain interoperability is fundamentally unsafe, and that "wrapped assets" generated by bridges can never be secure. This is a fatalistic argument that insists we stay in the walled-off intranet era, and ignores first principles knowledge on how to build secure bridges.

While many of today's cross-chain experiences may in fact be unsafe, these issues stem from the ad-hoc and patchwork nature of current interoperability solutions, which prevents users and developers from having transparent understanding of risk. In order for the cross-chain future to be robust and secure, we need trust-minimized solutions.

The Future: Seamlessly Connected Chains

  • Users Over Systems

  • Simple Over Complex

  • Safety Over Formalism

We envision a future where users can interact with censorship-resistant applications without knowing what chains they are interfacing with.

Developers will be able to design and write applications once, and deploy on many chains simultaneously, leveraging a simple interface that abstracts away the underlying infrastructure.

Underlying this will be a composite topology of chains, connected by a standardized cross-chain communication protocol that is safe for everyone to use.

Before the modern Internet as we know it today, we had . From the Wikipedia article:

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the .

In the best case scenario, the user has to context-switch multiple times, use several disparate interfaces, and pay gas fees multiple times. In the worst case scenario, users are at risk of losing all their funds, as evidenced by , totaling to over $1.5 billion USD exploited.

Nomad takes inspiration from protocols like in Cosmos, or in Polkadot, in our quest to create a secure, lightweight, and easy to deploy standard for chains to communicate with each other.

As outlined in our , Nomad prioritizes:

If this vision resonates with you, reach out at gm@nomad.xyz to this future.

ARPANET
packet-switched network
TCP/IP
Internet
multiple
nine-figure
bridge
hacks
IBC
XCMP
design philosophy
help us build
Nomad
the next wave of applications
Arpanet access points in 1980 ()
Source