The Rise of a New Layer 1 Public Chain: Nibiru Chain Focused on Decentralized Finance Applications

Recently, a new Layer 1 public chain called Nibiru Chain is attracting attention in the industry. The project launched a month-long airdrop campaign at the end of January this year, during which its community size grew by more than three times, and its Twitter followers exceeded 500,000. As an emerging public chain project with financing over 20 million USD, Nibiru Chain will focus on addressing the security and speed issues faced by DeFi applications, and is expected to become a strong competitor to dYdX.

Nibiru Chain is scheduled to officially launch its mainnet this week. As a rapidly emerging Layer 1 project, what technical features and competitive advantages does Nibiru Chain possess? What security considerations should be taken into account when developing projects within its ecosystem? Let us delve into these questions together.

Nibiru Chain Protocol Analysis

Nibiru Chain's core business focuses on Decentralized Finance trading, which mainly consists of the following four core components:

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

2. Nibi-Swap: This is an automated market maker protocol developed independently by Nibiru, 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, users can mint NUSD using USDC and NIBI, with the specific ratio determined by the collateralization ratio. For example, when 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 plans to support more types of collateral assets. Currently, the design concept of NUSD is similar to FRAX in the Cosmos ecosystem.

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

In 2024, the development focus of Nibiru Chain will be on expanding its ecosystem. Its main plans include: integrating with important DeFi projects on multiple public chains, launching on mainstream centralized exchanges, achieving parallel optimistic execution, and being fully compatible with EVM.

Secure Development Practice Guide

The process and required technologies for developing applications on the Nibiru Chain are basically the same as those on other Cosmos-based public chains. Here are some key recommendations to enhance the security of project contracts:

Contract Development Security

1. Be prepared to respond to attacks: Developers need to design upgradable smart contracts and establish comprehensive risk response plans.

2. Address Verification Standardization: Cosmos SDK addresses have two valid forms ( all lowercase and all uppercase ). When handling addresses in contracts, this characteristic must be taken into account to avoid security vulnerabilities caused by inconsistent address formatting.

3. Pay attention to operations and overflow: It is recommended to use CosmWasm's Uint256 and Uint512 types, and to use mathematical functions that do not overflow, such as full_mul().

4. Access Control: This is one of the core issues of program security. Ensure that all critical functions have appropriate access control measures to prevent unauthorized calls.

5. Preventing infinite loops: Be cautious with self-calls in the ACK handler to avoid falling into infinite loops that exhaust gas. This is especially important when passing packets between multiple CosmWasm contracts.

Project Security Practices

1. Smart Contract Audit: Conduct a comprehensive security audit of the contract code before mainnet deployment to identify and fix potential vulnerabilities.

2. Use multi-signature wallets: adopt multi-signature wallets to manage project funds and smart contracts, disperse risks, and improve security. Nibiru Chain has integrated the Nomos multi-signature solution, and project parties may consider using this solution for asset management.

Conclusion

Nibiru Chain, as an emerging Layer 1 public blockchain, provides an innovative platform for areas such as Decentralized Finance, gaming, and the on-chain representation of physical assets. It is committed to addressing the challenges of accessibility, security, and performance in Web3 applications, offering comprehensive high-quality services to developers and users. As its ecosystem continues to evolve, Nibiru Chain is expected to secure a position in the highly competitive public blockchain market.