The rise of emerging Layer 1 platforms, can Nibiru Chain become a new star in Decentralized Finance?

In late January 2024, an airdrop event was launched by a Layer 1 public chain called Nibiru Chain. After a month of operation, its community size tripled, and the number of Twitter followers exceeded 500,000. As an emerging public chain with financing exceeding $20 million, Nibiru Chain's main goal is to address security and speed issues in Decentralized Finance applications, and it is expected to become a potential competitor to a well-known derivatives trading platform.

Nibiru Chain plans to launch its mainnet this week. As a rapidly developing Layer1 platform, what are the technical features and competitive advantages of Nibiru Chain? What security issues should be considered when developing projects within its ecosystem? Let's explore these questions together.

Nibiru Chain Protocol Analysis

Nibiru Chain mainly focuses on Decentralized Finance trading. Its core components include the following four parts:

1. Nibi-Perps: This is an on-chain perpetual contract trading system that allows users to trade popular crypto assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Atom with up to 10x leverage. Stakers of the NIBI token will receive governance rights and trading fee discounts for Nibi-Perps.

2. Nibi-Swap: This is Nibiru's automated market maker protocol, which plans to support two types of liquidity pools: stablecoin exchange pools and regular constant product pools.

3. NUSD: This is an over-collateralized stablecoin in the Nibiru ecosystem. Initially, Nibiru plans to allow users to mint NUSD using USDC and NIBI, with the specific ratio determined by the collateralization ratio. For example, if the collateralization ratio is 80%, users need to provide 80 USDC and NIBI worth 20 NUSD to mint 100 NUSD. In the future, Nibiru Chain may support more types of collateral. Currently, the operation mode of NUSD is similar to that of a well-known algorithmic stablecoin in the Cosmos ecosystem.

4. Nibi-Oracles: This is Nibiru's native oracle solution. It allows validator operators to actively participate in oracle consensus voting, integrating off-chain data with high accuracy onto the blockchain, providing low-latency feedback for external APIs and smart contracts.

In 2024, the development focus of Nibiru Chain will be on expanding its ecosystem. Key plans include integration with major Decentralized Finance projects on multiple chains, listing on mainstream centralized exchanges, completing parallel optimistic execution, and achieving full EVM compatibility.

Best Practices for Secure Development

If developers want to build applications on the Nibiru Chain, their development process and required programming languages are almost identical to those of other public chains in the Cosmos ecosystem. Here are some suggestions to enhance the security of project contracts:

Contract Development Security

1. Be prepared to respond to attacks: Developers need to consider how to respond to potential attacks and fix any vulnerabilities that may arise. It is recommended to build upgradable smart contracts and establish a comprehensive risk response plan.

2. Pay attention to the standardization of address verification: In the Cosmos SDK, any valid address has two representations: all lowercase and all uppercase. Nibiru also follows this rule. When handling addresses in contracts, developers need to consider this characteristic to ensure consistency in address verification.

3. Pay attention to operations and overflow: During development, it is important to be aware of risks such as integer overflow and division by zero. It is recommended to use the Uint256 and Uint512 types provided by CosmWasm, and to use mathematical functions that do not overflow, such as full_mul().

4. Pay attention to access control: Access control is one of the key issues in program security. In CosmWasm contracts, developers need to pay special attention to this point, ensuring that only authorized users can perform critical operations.

5. Preventing infinite loops: Although CosmWasm contracts have a high gas limit set, improper use may still exhaust gas. Developers need to be cautious to avoid potential infinite loops when handling data packet transfers between contracts to prevent excessive gas costs.

Project Security Practices

1. Smart Contract Audit: Regular security audits of the project's smart contracts are crucial. It is recommended to conduct the audit after the contract development is completed and before the mainnet deployment to identify and eliminate potential security risks.

2. Use multi-signature wallets: Project teams should consider using multi-signature wallets to manage project funds and smart contracts. Multi-signature accounts should be jointly held by multiple entities to reduce potential access control risks and the likelihood of internal malfeasance. Nibiru Chain has adopted a certain multi-signature solution, and project teams may consider using this tool for asset management.

Conclusion

Nibiru Chain, as an emerging Layer1 public chain, provides an innovative platform for DeFi, gaming, and the tokenization of physical assets. It is dedicated to addressing accessibility, security, and performance issues in Web3 applications, aiming to offer comprehensive and high-quality services to developers and ordinary users. With the imminent launch of its mainnet, we will be watching closely to see how Nibiru Chain performs in the highly competitive blockchain ecosystem.