ERC-7786: Cross-Chain Messaging Gateway

An interface for contracts to send and receive cross-chain messages containing arbitrary data.

Abstract

This proposal describes an interface, and the corresponding workflow, for smart contracts to send arbitrary data through cross-chain messaging protocols. The end goal of this proposal is to have all such messaging protocols accessible via this interface (natively or using “adapters”) to improve their composability and interoperability. That would allow a new class of cross-chain native smart contracts to emerge while reducing vendor lock-in. This proposal is modular by design, allowing users to leverage bridge-specific features through attributes (structured metadata) while providing simple “universal” access to the simple feature of “just getting a simple message through”.

Motivation

Cross-chain messaging protocols (or bridges) allow communication between smart contracts deployed on different blockchains. There is a large diversity of such protocols with multiple degrees of decentralization, different architectures, implementing different interfaces, and providing different guarantees to users.

Because almost every protocol implements a different workflow using a specific interface, portability between bridges is currently basically impossible. This also prevents the development of generic contracts that rely on cross chain communication.

The objective of this ERC is to provide a standard interface, and a corresponding workflow, for performing cross-chain communication between contracts. Existing cross-chain communication protocols that do not natively implement this interface should be able to adopt it using adapter gateway contracts.

Compared to previous ERCs in this area, this ERC offers compatibility with chains outside of the Ethereum/EVM ecosystem, and it is extensible to support the different feature sets of various protocols while offering a shared core of standard functionality.

Specification

The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”, “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “NOT RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL” in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 and RFC 8174.

Message Field Encoding

A cross-chain message consists of a sender, recipient, payload, value (native token), and list of attributes.

Sender and Recipient

The sender account (in the source chain) and recipient account (in the destination chain) MUST be input in an Interoperable Address binary format, specified in ERC-7930, which MUST be serialized according to CAIP-350. The recipient field MAY be omitted or zeroed (contain an Interoperable Address with all fields set to zero) to indicate an unspecified destination, such as when a broadcast mode is employed and the final recipients are determined by the protocol itself.

Payload

The payload is an opaque bytes value.

Attributes

An attribute is a key-value pair, where the key determines the type and encoding of the value, as well as its meaning and behavior in the gateway.

The set of valid attributes is extensible. It is RECOMMENDED to standardize them and their characteristics by publishing them as ERCs. A gateway MAY support any set of standard or custom attributes.

An attribute key is a 4-byte value (bytes4). It is RECOMMENDED to define a key as the function selector for a function signature according to Solidity ABI (for example, minGasLimit(uint256) resulting in the key 39f87ba1), so as to give the key a human-readable name and a standard value encoding corresponding to the ABI-encoding of the function arguments.

An attribute value is byte array (bytes).

The list of attributes MUST be encoded as bytes[] (an array of bytes) where each element is the concatenation of a key and a value. (Note that in the case of keys defined as Solidity function selectors, each element of the array can be encoded by abi.encodeWithSignature.)

A message with no attributes (an empty attributes list) MUST be considered a valid message.

Sending Procedure

A Source Gateway is a contract that offers a protocol to send a message to a recipient on another chain. It MUST implement IERC7786GatewaySource.

interface IERC7786GatewaySource {
    event MessageSent(
        bytes32 indexed sendId,
        bytes sender,    // Binary Interoperable Address
        bytes recipient, // Binary Interoperable Address
        bytes payload,
        uint256 value,
        bytes[] attributes
    );

    error UnsupportedAttribute(bytes4 selector);

    function supportsAttribute(bytes4 selector) external view returns (bool);

    function sendMessage(
        bytes calldata recipient, // Binary Interoperable Address
        bytes calldata payload,
        bytes[] calldata attributes
    ) external payable returns (bytes32 sendId);
}

supportsAttribute

Returns a boolean indicating whether an attribute (identified by its key) is supported by the gateway.

A gateway MAY be upgraded with support for additional attributes. Once present support for an attribute SHOULD NOT be removed to preserve backwards compatibility with users of the gateway.

sendMessage

Initiates the sending of a message.

Further action MAY be required by the gateway to make the sending of the message effective, such as providing payment for gas. See Post-processing.

MUST revert with UnsupportedAttribute if an unsupported attribute is included. MAY revert if an attribute value is not valid for the key.

MAY accept call value (native token) to be sent with the message. MUST revert if call value is included but it is not a feature supported by the gateway. It is unspecified how this value is represented on the destination.

MAY generate and return a unique non-zero send identifier, otherwise returning zero. This identifier can be used to track the lifecycle of the message in the source gateway in events and for post-processing. Note that this identifier MAY be different from the receiveId that is delivered to the recipient, since that identifier may preferably consist of values like transaction id and log index that are not available in the execution environment.

MUST emit a MessageSent event, including the optional send identifier that is returned by the function.

MessageSent

This event signals that a would-be sender has requested a message to be sent.

If sendId is present, post-processing MAY be required to send the message through the cross-chain channel.

Post-processing

After a sender has invoked sendMessage, further action MAY be required by the gateways to make the message effective. This is called post-processing. For example, some payment is typically required to cover the gas of executing the message at the destination.

The exact interface for any such action is out of scope of this ERC.

Reception Procedure

A Destination Gateway is a contract that implements a protocol to validate messages sent on other chains. The interface of the destination gateway and how it is invoked is out of scope of this ERC.

The protocol MUST ensure delivery of a sent message to its recipient using the IERC7786Recipient interface (specified below), which the recipient MUST implement.

Once the message can be safely delivered (see Properties), the gateway MUST invoke receiveMessage with the message identifier and contents, unless the sender or the recipient explicitly requested otherwise.

The receiveId MUST be either empty or unique (for the calling gateway) to the message being relayed. The format of this identifier is not specified, and the gateway can use it at its own discretion. For example it can be an identifier of the MessagePosted event that created the message.

The gateway MUST verify that receiveMessage returns the correct value, and MUST revert otherwise.

interface IERC7786Recipient {
    function receiveMessage(
        bytes32 receiveId,     // Unique identifier
        bytes calldata sender, // Binary Interoperable Address
        bytes calldata payload,
    ) external payable returns (bytes4);
}

receiveMessage

Delivery of a message sent from another chain.

The recipient MUST validate that the caller of this function is a known gateway, i.e., one whose underlying cross-chain messaging protocol it trusts.

MUST return IERC7786Recipient.receiveMessage.selector (0x2432ef26).

Interaction Diagram

Properties

The protocol underlying a pair of gateways is expected to guarantee a series of properties. For a detailed definition and discussion, we refer to XChain Research’s Cross-chain Interoperability Report.

• The protocol MUST guarantee Safety: A message is delivered at the destination if and only if it was sent at the source. The delivery process must ensure a message is only delivered once the sending transaction is finalized, and not delivered more than once. Note that there can be multiple messages with identical parameters that must be delivered separately.
• The protocol MUST guarantee Liveness: A sent message is eventually delivered to the destination, assuming Liveness and censorship-resistance of the source and destination chains and that any protocol costs are paid.
• The protocol SHOULD guarantee Timeliness: A sent message is delivered at the destination within a bounded delivery time, which should be documented.
• The above properties SHOULD NOT rely on trust in some centralized actor. For example, safety should be guaranteed by some trustless mechanism such as a light client proof or attestations by an open, decentralized validator set. Relaying should be decentralized or permissionless to ensure liveness; a centralized relayer can fail and thus halt the protocol.

Rationale

Attributes are designed so that gateways can expose any specific features the bridge offers without having to use a proprietary interface. This should allow contracts to change the gateway they use while continuing to express messages the same way. This portability offers many advantages:

• A contract that relies on a specific gateway for sending messages is vulnerable to the gateway being paused, deprecated, or simply breaking. If the communication between the contract and the gateway is standard, an admin of the contract could update the address (in storage) of the gateway to use. In particular, senders to update to the new gateway when a new version is available.
• Bridge layering is made easier. In particular, this interface should allow for gateways that route the message through multiple independent bridges. Delivery of the message could require one or multiple of these independent bridges depending on whether improved liveness or safety is desired.

As some cross-chain communication protocols require additional parameters beyond the destination and the payload, and because we want to send messages through those bridges without any knowledge of these additional parameters, a post-processing of the message MAY be required (after sendMessage is called, and before the message is delivered). The additional parameters MAY be supported through attributes, which would remove the need for a post-processing step. If these additional parameters are not provided through attributes, an additional call to the gateway is REQUIRED for the message to be sent. If possible, the gateway SHOULD be designed so that anyone with an incentive for the message to be delivered can jump in. A malicious actor providing invalid parameters SHOULD NOT prevent the message from being successfully relayed by someone else.

Some protocols gateway support doing arbitrary direct calls on the recipient. In that case, the recipient must detect that they are being called by the gateway to properly identify cross-chain messages. Getters are available on the gateway to figure out where the cross-chain message comes from (source chain and sender address). This approach has the downside that it allows anyone to trigger any call from the gateway to any contract. This is dangerous if the gateway ever holds any assets (ERC-20 or similar). The use of a dedicated receiveMessage function on the recipient protects any assets or permissions held by the gateway against such attacks. If the ability to perform direct calls is desired, this can be implemented as a wrapper on top of any gateway that implements this ERC.

Backwards Compatibility

Existing cross-chain messaging protocols implement proprietary interfaces. We recommend that protocols natively implement the standard interface defined here, and propose the development of standard adapters for those that don’t.

Security Considerations

Handling addresses

Interoperable Addresses (ERC‑7930) rely on CAIP‑350 serialization. Using non‑canonical encodings can lead to silent delivery failures. Gateways SHOULD reject non‑canonical encodings and MAY normalize them before emission.

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.

Citation

Please cite this document as:

Francisco Giordano (@frangio), Hadrien Croubois (@Amxx), Ernesto Garcia (@ernestognw), CJ Cobb (@cjcobb23), Sergey Gorbunov (@sergeynog), joxes (@Joxess), "ERC-7786: Cross-Chain Messaging Gateway [DRAFT]," Ethereum Improvement Proposals, no. 7786, October 2024. [Online serial]. Available: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-7786.