Here is a round up of what’s cooking at Router Protocol! We are doing this sort of an update after quite a while, and plan to do it regularly in the future, respecting the wishes of the community from the last AMA.

As many of you know, Router closed a fundraise of $4.1 million which saw participation from some leading investors. The round was oversubscribed and saw participation from the likes of Alameda Research, Coinbase Ventures, QCP capital, Wintermute, Polygon, Woodstock Fund, etc. We are truly excited to have along with this in the journey, some of the leading players in crypto today — including investors, market makers and blockchains.

On the product buildout side of things — things are moving ahead at full steam. Our incentivized testnet which was introduced last month was a huge success and we have received feedback from over 1,000 community members. At the moment the team is processing all this valuable feedback and converting them to action items to be sequenced into the development roadmap.

We shared our updated and upgraded smart contracts with ImmueFi — the place where we run our bug bounty program. We have received a critical vulnerability bug report which would have allowed the hacker to drain the staked assets from the bridge. It should be noted that the bug revealed in the smart contract was already audited by Halborn Protocol; A big takeaway here is that securing Router is a journey, and not a destination. Another big takeaway is that quite frequently, community efforts around audits are sometimes better at catching critical vulnerabilities than traditional audit advisory firms. Having said that, we think the best solution is to combine traditional security consultant audits with community audits.

As we have said many times before, building in the cross-chain space is hard — Over the last few months, cross-chain projects have been a big draw for hackers. This has been a key reason for our slow and steady approach with an overwhelming focus on security. However, it is clear that this need for caution has to be balanced with a clear momentum in terms of meeting product milestones. Keeping this in mind and in response to feedback from the community, going forward, we are going to adopt a more agile approach in our deployments and go-to market strategy. After accounting for all the recent events we are pleased to announce a firm launch date for the mainnet; the day is 27 January, 2022

The date was chosen after taking into account various factors such as the upcoming holiday week around the New Year (even the hard-working Router team needs a break once in a while), the need to patch the newly exposed critical vulnerability as well as future vulnerabilities that might be thrown up by the ongoing audit processes, as well as the need to incorporate some of the critical community feedback elements from the testnet. While this might be later than many in the community want to see the mainnet ideally, we think the extra few weeks will give the team that much extra time to fix multiple known issues, and launch a v1 mainnet product with a more robust feature set with multiple EVM chains.

We have also started laying the groundwork for Router V2 and have made significant progress on the v2 architecture and design as well as the updated white paper. Many of the finer details are still being thought through but it is going to be a very major technical upgrade which will open up doors to an entirely new eco-system consisting of validators, stakers, LPs etc. It will be a whole new Router blockchain.

About Router Protocol

Router Protocol is building a suite of cross-chain liquidity infra primitives that aims to seamlessly provide bridging infrastructure between current and emerging Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchain solutions.