The emerging public chain Nibiru Chain is about to launch its Mainnet and is expected to become a potential competitor to dYdX.

Nibiru Chain, as an emerging Layer 1 public chain project, has recently attracted widespread attention in the cryptocurrency community. The project's airdrop event launched at the end of January 2024 achieved significant results, with the community size expanding more than threefold within a month and the Twitter follower count surpassing 500,000. As a new public chain project with over $20 million in funding, Nibiru Chain's main goal is to address the challenges of security and speed in DeFi applications, with the potential to become a strong competitor to dYdX.

Nibiru Chain plans to officially launch its Mainnet this week. As a rapidly emerging Layer 1 project, what technical features and competitive advantages does Nibiru Chain have? What security issues should developers pay attention to when building projects in its ecosystem? Let's dive into these questions.

Nibiru Chain Protocol Analysis

The core business of Nibiru Chain is focused on the DeFi trading sector. Its main components include the following four aspects:

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

2. Nibi-Swap: This is Nibiru's automated market maker protocol, which plans to support two types of liquidity pools: stablecoin exchange pools and standard 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 dollars worth of USDC and 20 dollars worth of NIBI to mint 100 NUSD. In the future, Nibiru Chain plans to expand the types of acceptable collateral. Currently, the design of NUSD is similar to the FRAX 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, ensuring that off-chain data can be highly accurately integrated into the blockchain, providing low-latency feedback for external APIs and smart contracts.

Looking ahead to 2024, Nibiru Chain will focus on expanding its ecosystem. Key plans include integration with major DeFi projects on multiple public chains, listing on well-known centralized exchanges, completing the implementation of parallel optimistic execution, and achieving full EVM compatibility.

Secure Development Practices

For developers looking to build applications on the Nibiru Chain, the development process and required programming languages are essentially the same as those of other public chains in the Cosmos ecosystem. Here are some guidelines to enhance the security of project contracts:

Contract Development Security

1. Be prepared to respond to attacks

Similar to developing smart contracts using Solidity, developers need to consider how to deal with potential attacks and fix possible vulnerabilities. Therefore, it is crucial to build upgradeable 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. The Nibiru Chain also follows this rule. When dealing with addresses in contracts, developers need to consider this feature to ensure consistency in address validation.

3. Pay attention to operations and overflow

In CosmWasm contracts, developers need to pay special attention to 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 lead to overflow, such as full_mul().

4. Access Control Issues

Access control is one of the core issues of program security. In CosmWasm contracts, developers need to pay special attention to implementing appropriate access control mechanisms to prevent unauthorized operations.

5. Prevent infinite loops

Although the CosmWasm contract sets a high gas limit, improper use can still lead to gas exhaustion. Developers need to be careful to avoid situations that could lead to infinite loops when designing the data packet transmission between contracts, in order to prevent excessive gas costs.

Project Security Practices

1. Smart Contract Audit

It is extremely important to conduct regular security audits of the project's smart contracts. It is recommended to perform a comprehensive security audit after the contract development is completed and before the Mainnet deployment to identify and fix potential security vulnerabilities.

2. Use a multi-signature wallet

The project team should consider using a multi-signature wallet to manage project funds and smart contracts. Multi-signature accounts require multiple entities to jointly hold them, which helps to reduce potential access control risks and the likelihood of internal malfeasance. It is worth noting that Nibiru Chain has adopted the Nomos multi-signature solution, and the project team may consider using Nomos for asset management.

Summary

Nibiru Chain, as an emerging Layer 1 public chain project, provides an innovative platform for DeFi, gaming, and the tokenization of physical assets. The project is dedicated to addressing the challenges of accessibility, security, and performance in Web3 applications, aiming to offer comprehensive and high-quality services for developers and users. With the imminent launch of the Mainnet, Nibiru Chain is expected to secure a place in the highly competitive public chain market and could become a strong competitor to established projects such as dYdX.