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AVS Screening - Witness Chain

Witness Chain

Contract address: 0xd25c2c5802198cb8541987b73a8db4c9bcae5cc7
Website: https://www.witnesschain.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/witnesschain
Docs: https://docs.witnesschain.com/
Blog: https://docs.witnesschain.com/resources/technical-papers
AVS Category: Rollups
ETH Restaked: 2,339,817
Total Operators: 75
Total restakers: 92,953
Competitors: No direct AVS competitors for DePIN security
Mainnet Date: April 11th, 2024
Economic Security wanted: $1 Million ETH
Operator limits: None
Points program: N/A

AVS Description

Witness Chain AVS employs a decentralized watchtower network to enhance the security and reliability of optimistic rollups and decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs). Using Proof-of-Diligence (PoD), it incentivizes watchtowers to maintain vigilant oversight of transaction verifications. Witness Chains' approach deters fraud by ensuring consistent watchtower performance but also decentralizes and automates the fraud detection process, reducing reliance on after-the-fact validator interventions.

Unique Selling Proposition

Watchtower protocol integrates PoD mechanism that is designed to verify L2 state claims on L1. By unique incentivization of validators, Witness Chain ensures more robust and proactive fraud detection, addressing a critical gap in existing blockchain security practices. As the first physical state consensus protocol, Witness Chain unifies DePINs, enabling a shared economy that optimizes resource allocation and fosters innovation across various sectors. Integrating with Witness Chain offers several compelling benefits for DePIN chains: enhanced discoverability and economic growth by facilitating the creation of new services and bundled offerings, real-time visibility into available resources, reducing wastage and improving operational efficiency, and access to comprehensive state information enables app builders to develop innovative services and improve existing ones .

Economic Model

N/A

Points Program

N/А

Other Product Information

As of the current review, only the Rollups Watchtowers protocol stands operational on the mainnet. Other significant elements of the platform, such as the DePIN Coordination Layer (DCL) and the supplementary Bandwidth and Location Watchtowers, remain under development.

Builders

Pramod Vishwanath - Co-Founder
Himanshu Tyagi - Co-Founder
Ranvir Rana - Co-Founder

Backers

Investors: Haun Ventures with participation from Frontiers Capital, Yi Sun, Uma Roy, Elias Simos, Ethereal Ventures, Tim Beiko, Tarun Chitra, John Adler, Rob Witoff, dao5, Robot Ventures, Nic Carter, Henri Stern, Scott Sunarto, Polychain Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and others.

Partnerships: Ether.fi, Puffer, Arbitrum, Base.

Centralization

The AVS contract is owned by multisig with four signatories:
[0xa7ec0a5A7798e1480224F878863A4E24b5473945]
[0x96521196855D19C56A35301A014cF99455b0F221]
[0x4EA5cff3890A03b5e6F2321B1Ce2cDca6d9fBd44]
[0x626E11D7C870C05E4e67F31983487a149a29ccfe]

The current Withness Chain documentation does not disclose the identities or affiliations of these multisig participants.

Security

The audit conducted by Dedaub on Witness Chain's AVS contracts in March 2024 resulted in no findings of high or critical severity issues. Medium and low severity issues were either acknowledged or resolved.

Maturity

Mainnet date: April 11th, 2024
Goerli date: December 16th, 2023
Sepolia date: January 24th, 2024

Watchtower-contracts repo had a single boost of commits pre-mainnet launch, followed by a long period of inactivity. Watchtower-client repository is much more active with regular commits to date.

Regulatory Complexity

Low risk of legal challenges is anticipated for the project, rooted in its infrastructural nature, which positions it to be regulatory agnostic.

Risk Considerations

  • Admin rights are centralized under a multisig wallet, controlled by four signatories whose identities remain undisclosed;
  • The absence of a clearly communicated economic model undermines the ability of operators and re-stakers to effectively assess the risk-reward dynamics and engage in sound financial planning. This lack of transparency hinders their capability to anticipate returns, understand the types of tokens utilized, and the conditions attached to allocations.
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