The Rise of the Emerging Public Chain Nibiru Chain: Decentralized Finance Innovation and Security Development Practices

At the end of January 2024, a new public chain called Nibiru Chain launched an airdrop incentive program. In just one month, its community size expanded more than threefold, with Twitter followers surpassing 500,000. As a new public chain project with financing exceeding $20 million, Nibiru Chain is committed to addressing the security and speed issues in decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, and is expected to become a strong competitor to dYdX.

Nibiru Chain plans to launch its mainnet this week. As a rapidly growing Layer 1 public chain, 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's core business focuses on the Decentralized Finance trading sector. Its main components include the following four:

1. Nibi-Perps: This is an on-chain perpetual contract trading platform that allows users to trade popular crypto assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cosmos with leverage of up to 10 times. Stakers of the $NIBI token will gain 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, users can 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 equivalent to 20 NUSD to mint 100 $NUSD. In the future, Nibiru Chain plans to support more types of collateral. Currently, the operational model of $NUSD is similar to that of $FRAX 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. Major plans include integration with leading Decentralized Finance projects across multiple chains, listing on well-known centralized exchanges, completing parallel optimistic execution, and achieving full Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility.

Secure Development Practices

If developers intend to build applications on the Nibiru Chain, their development process and required programming languages are basically the same as those of other public chains in the Cosmos ecosystem. The following security guidelines can help improve the contract security of the project:

Contract Development Security

1. Preparation to Prevent Attacks: Similar to developing smart contracts using Solidity, developers need to consider how to respond to potential attacks and fix possible vulnerabilities. Therefore, building upgradable smart contracts and formulating a comprehensive risk response plan is crucial.

2. Standardization of Address Verification: In the Cosmos SDK, each valid address has two representations: all lowercase and all uppercase. The Nibiru Chain also follows this rule. When handling addresses in contracts, developers need to consider this feature to ensure the consistency of address verification.

3. Be Aware of Arithmetic and Overflow Issues: In CosmWasm contracts, developers need to be cautious of integer overflow risks and situations like division by zero. It is recommended to use the Uint256 and Uint512 types provided by CosmWasm, and to prioritize mathematical functions that do not lead to overflow, such as full_mul().

4. Access Control Issues: Access control is one of the key issues of program security. In CosmWasm contracts, developers need to pay special attention to this to ensure that only authorized users can perform specific operations.

5. Prevent Infinite Loops: Although CosmWasm contracts set a high gas limit, improper usage can still lead to gas exhaustion. Particularly when passing data packets between two CosmWasm contracts, care should be taken to avoid potential infinite loops to prevent excessive gas fees.

Project Security Practices

1. Smart Contract Audit: Regular security audits of the project's smart contracts are crucial. Audits should be conducted after the contract development is completed and before the mainnet deployment, to systematically identify and eliminate potential security vulnerabilities.

2. Use Multi-Signature Wallets: Project teams should consider using multi-signature wallets to manage project funds and smart contracts. Multi-signature accounts require multiple entities to jointly hold, which helps reduce potential access control risks and the possibility of internal malfeasance. Nibiru Chain currently uses the Nomos multi-signature solution, and project teams may consider using this tool for asset management.

Conclusion

As an emerging Layer 1 public chain, Nibiru Chain provides an innovative platform for Decentralized Finance, gaming, and the tokenization of physical assets. It aims to address the challenges of accessibility, security, and performance in Web3 applications, offering comprehensive and high-quality services to developers and users. With its mainnet set to launch soon, Nibiru Chain is expected to occupy an important position in the rapidly evolving blockchain ecosystem.