RFC: Polkadot Bridges Explorer & Cross-Chain Intelligence

Tech Talk
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Hello Polkadot Community!

My name is Andres Monty (@aesmonty), and I am the founder of Range. I want to take this opportunity to introduce ourselves and share a preview of a proposal for 2025.

Range is a leading blockchain security and intelligence platform with deep expertise in building cross-chain explorers and Rust-based ecosystems. We work with leading ecosystems such as the Solana Foundation and industry leaders like Circle.

We will be proposing an extensive integration of Polkadot and Kusama Asset & Bridge Hub, including XCMP, Hyperbridge, and Snowbridge, to Range’s platform and wanted to get your feedback first.

Below, we summarize why we think this project will be essential for Polkadot’s growth and ecosystem awareness in 2025.

Why?

We believe Polkadot has built a thriving decentralized ecosystem and a top-tier technology stack, but it can sometimes feel hard to navigate or get onboard by users and investors of other ecosystems like Ethereum, Solana, and Cosmos.

We want to help increase the user growth, volumes, and liquidity of the Polkadot ecosystem by improving the cross-chain user experience from and to Polkadot and making Polkadot safer for new (and existing) users.

How?

  • Improve the cross-chain user onboarding experience, attract new crypto users, and grow the visibility of Polkadot.
  • Provide the Polkadot ecosystem with an advanced cross-chain explorer for intelligence and security.

Range is a cross-chain explorer and intelligence platform supporting Solana, Cosmos, and L1 appchains with deep expertise in Rust development & cross-chain integration. We provide critical infrastructure across the risk and security lifecycle to help organizations and users build and use DeFi safely. Range Trail, our cross-chain wallet monitoring tool, is leveraged by multiple teams to perform incident response and identify stolen funds in security hacks.

Our clients and trusted partners include the Solana Foundation, Circle, dYdX, Celestia, Osmosis, Noble, Cosmos Hub, and many more. Our USDC Explorer is also the primary explorer for Circle’s CCTP protocol, helping users track cross-chain stablecoin transfers daily across the main EVM chains, Solana, Sui, and Cosmos.

Ecosystem Benefits

Access to new users and communities

Currently, onboarding to the Polkadot ecosystem from vibrant networks like Solana is not straightforward. The Range’s platform integration will attract a new user base and increase visibility by engaging adjacent communities such as Solana, Ethereum, EVM L2s, dYdX, and Cosmos.

Cross-chain visibility and growth

Range offers a robust, purpose-built explorer with advanced cross-chain capabilities, enabling users to monitor Polkadot activity in real-time. Tailored for crypto natives, traders, and financial firms, it delivers valuable insights without ads or distractions. With its advanced cross-chain intelligence, Range will empower users to analyze Polkadot’s user base, track cross-chain flows, and seamlessly bridge to Polkadot. These capabilities support data-driven strategic decisions, including effectively targeting and engaging Solana’s user base.

Safety for the Polkadot userbase

Range will enable ecosystem-wide monitoring covering a broad range of attack surfaces, including bridges, to track assets, funds, and activity for intelligence, compliance, and incident response purposes. With integrated workflows and machine learning capabilities, teams will be able to instantly detect and respond to anomalies, empowering projects to build with confidence and security.

The Solution

  • Advanced Explorer: Full integration of Polkadot and Kusama Relay Chains, Asset Hubs, and Bridge Hub for Range’s advanced explorer to provide cross-chain assets view, tracking of all asset movements in and out of Polkadot, the filtering inflows and outflows per asset type, bridge route, and counterparty chain.
  • Polkadot Bridge Explorer & Public Dashboard: A public dashboard for major Polkadot bridges, hosting a suite of analytics based on inflows, outflows, volume, and stocks of bridged assets.
  • Trail Intelligence Integration: Integration of Polkadot in Trail, Range’s leading cross-chain risk and compliance tool. Trail will track Polkadot transaction flows and user profiles across Polkadot counterparty networks, cross-chain flows, and CCTP transactions, with graph and address cluster view support for Polkadot addresses.
  • Real-time Monitoring and Alerting: Our customizable tools will track wallet activity and transactions within the Polkadot ecosystem, delivering real-time notifications through preferred channels. This ensures prompt intervention and bolsters security for users and organizations alike.

Future roadmap items will include expanding support to parachains, JAM, and the broader Polkadot ecosystem.

We are aware of the recent proposals to Polkadot’s Treasury for large-scale integrations for various tool suites, so we wanted to get any community feedback in the forum first.

Looking forward to hearing your questions and comments!

About Range

  • Range Website: range[dot]org
  • Twitter: @RangeSecurity
  • Range Platform: app[dot]range[dot]org
  • Range CCTP Bridge Explorer: usdc[dot]range[dot]org
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That sounds great, but is there a bridge (DOT<->SOL) yet?

I asked about it recently because I’d like my community (another Substrate chain) to be able to bridge to Solana.

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Thanks for your comment!

There is no direct Polkadot ↔ Solana bridge that we are aware of as of now.

However, you can use an intermediate chain like Ethereum to do that bridge transaction (e.g., Solana → Ethereum → Polkadot).

Our cross-chain explorers support multi-hop transactions, so we improve the UX and DevX, showing the user’s full path.

Example from our USDC explorer:

Solana and dYdX chain don’t have a direct bridge connection, but we showed a 2-hop cross-chain transaction (going over Noble, a Cosmos chain similar to Polkadot’s Asset Hub).

Link: USDC Trail, the first native CCTP bridge explorer

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That was actually something I was trying to get done (for my particular community, a Substrate chain with existing Ethereum-wrapped ERC20 contract/token), with the idea to create a Solana-wrapped ERC20 token, but when I inquired in the Meteoras community, most people thought that sounded weak.

I’ll keep an eye on this thread, maybe something better/easier/native comes up… We’re not even DOT/KSM, so if a direct Polkadot<->Solana bridge tech appears, that would be super for smaller/other Substrate chains. I know some possibilities exist for round-about hopping for Polkadot, but other Substrate chains don’t necessarily support those Polkadot components required to make that work, so I’ll wait until there’s a native Substrate bridge without special chain-specific features.

Our community is in the process of issuing a BRC20 token of our wrapped ERC20 token - we’ll use that one on Crowdswap (and later maybe other DEXes), so going via BNB to Solana could be another round-about way, if there are BNB<->SOL routes. Still, unwrapping from SOL to native Substrate chain would be a 3-hop PITA (slow and and costly, especially the Ethereum leg).

Good stuff, thanks for sharing!

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Hi @aesmonty,

On behalf of the Snowbridge team, I’d say we would definitely appreciate this project. Our current cross-chain monitoring & intelligence solutions are limited.

We are most interested in the bridge explorer and intelligence platform.

The Solution

Advanced Explorer
Polkadot Bridge Explorer & Public Dashboard

I’d add some caveats here:

  • The long-term the goal is to migrate all assets from the relay chain to asset hub. In any case the only asset type supported by the relaychain is DOT.
  • BridgeHub is a more of an internal implementation detail for several bridges, and has no relevance for normal users. In fact, there are no assets or user accounts stored on BridgeHub (besides DOT).

Snowbridge uses AssetHub as an intermediary hop between third-party parachains and Ethereum. I.e all cross-chain transfers flow through it.

You mention that support for indexing third-party parachains will be a future roadmap item.

Well I think the problem here is that nearly all of Snowbridge’s bridging activity involves these third-party chains. And this certainly would be the case for Hyperbridge too.

So a bridge explorer that only indexes AssetHub<->Ethereum transfers won’t have much interesting data to show. I’d encourage you to include at least one third-party parachain in your initial proposal.

Ecosystem Benefits

Access to new users and communities

I’m a bit skeptical that the proposed monitoring suite would directly attract a significant number of new users. However, I think this is OK, since I think the proposal brings value in other ways.

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Hi @Vincent,

Thank you for your comment. It’s great to hear the Snowbridge team would find the bridge explorer and the intelligence platform valuable.

That’s great feedback. If supporting third-party parachains cross-chain activity would make our proposition more valuable to the community, we will prioritize this in our roadmap and include it in the scope of this proposal. The goal would be to support (Ethereum, EVM rollups, etc.) ↔ AssetHub ↔ Parachains, so we cover the end-to-end user experience.

Our products, like the USDC Explorer, are the primary way users and developers from the Ethereum and Solana ecosystems track stablecoin transactions. We believe including Polkadot in the mix would help make onboarding those communities easier. Having said that, we’re thinking of other complementary tools that could have an even more significant impact on user acquisition and eco growth, which is coming from this proposal.

Let me know if you have more questions or suggestions. Thanks again!

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Hey! Thanks for this proposal.

In your planned scope, are you also considering chains like Moonbeam? Moonbeam currently holds most of the bridging activity in Polkadot, mainly through Wormhole, but also some through Axelar and LayerZero.

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Hi @albertov19, thanks for your comment!

As @Vincent mentioned in the comment above, adding cross-chain support for third-party chains would be key to bringing value to the broader Polkadot community.

Since Moonbeam is a key part of that and represents a meaningful share of the crosschain inflows and outflows to Polkadot, we think it would be a good idea to expand the scope and include comprehensive coverage for key parachains like Moonbeam in our proposal. We’re deeply familiar with Wormhole, Axelar, and LayerZero, so we plan to integrate all those routes.

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Awesome! I’m happy to connect you with Moonbeam’s DevRel team to help with this integration. I think this can be a useful tool :grin:

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Hello
thanks a lot for sharing, good to see such initiative
From a Security point of view more actionable information to be able to identify abnormal / unusual pattern will be wonderful. The different areas of interest will be:

  • XCM (flows between chains, excessive minting vs reserves)
  • Bridges (with connection to the flow of the different ones)
  • DEFI TVL and Volumes (Market Maker, Liquidity Pool, Lending, etc for the different chains)
  • CEX (flows between CEX and Polkadot and the different chains)
  • Tagging of addresses of interest (ability to focus on specific addresses to do analysis, monitoring, tracking)
  • Governance (for the chains, different stage of when a proposal change state: confirming, executing)

And the ability to manage customs rules as different projects have different specific needs

→ Don’t hesitate to reach PAL for more details on the above

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For the chains, I would add also using of “root” or other powerful operations to pre-detect cases like paralell F.

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yes on the section governance specific focus on Root will be nice

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Hi @VinceCorsica, Nico here from Velocity Labs.

Given our focus on Infra and DeFi, we’re very excited about the potential of working with the Range team to ensure the Polkadot ecosystem is covered within their Cross-Chain Explorer, as well as to build a Polkadot Native XCM Explorer—something the ecosystem has been missing.

We’ve already spoken with Andres from their team and have provided further guidance on the pain points we face and how their product could help address them.

However, for a project of this scale, we believe a progressive approach is more effective than an “all-at-once” strategy. This approach offers several benefits:

  1. It allows us to adjust the roadmap and requirements as we go. What we need today may not be what we need tomorrow.
  2. While the treasury now supports scheduled payments, it doesn’t yet allow for milestone-based payments. With our DeFi Infra & Tooling Bounty, we typically disburse child bounties based on delivered milestones. This ensures the treasury is actually paying for completed work.

For this reason, we believe breaking the project down into smaller phases will lead to a better outcome. All additional functionalities like the ones Vince has posted will be easier to be built after an initial MVP that lay down the foundation to build on top of it.

The Range team has already submitted a streamlined application based on our guidance, which focuses on building the foundational pieces necessary to deliver an MVP faster and with a smaller DOT allocation. This approach will also allow us to collaboratively build the best possible product alongside Range and the Polkadot ecosystem.

This still needs to get approved by the bounty curators, but I wanted to provide some color to the community on how we are planning on handling this project. We’re definitely excited to support such a capable team as Range into getting their foot in the door of the Polkadot ecosystem

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Hi everyone, Andres from Range here.

@VinceCorsica, I really appreciate your comment above. We have incorporated all your suggestions into our Polkadot integration roadmap. We plan to solve the first two items (XCM and bridge flows) as soon as we build the Polkadot Cross-chain Explorer. As we progress in our integration, we will reach out to PAL to incorporate further feedback and more ideas to make the ecosystem more secure and transparent.

As @nico_a explained above, we have been working with Velocity Labs and other ecosystem stakeholders, such as parachain teams, to ensure the long-term success of this project. Given the endeavor’s importance and complexity, a multi-phase approach enables us to work iteratively alongside parachain and core teams and bring faster value to the community.

We’re grateful for the feedback and support we’ve been receiving from so many people and projects in the Polkadot ecosystem, and we hope to launch our first products and integrations very soon!

If you’re from a parachain team and we haven’t chatted yet or are a community member excited about new features we could incorporate, I’m always available at andres@range.org.

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Thanks @aesmonty and @nico_a for the feedback and context.

Fully supportive of a milestones approach, it is better from multiple perspectives

Looking forward to sync on how / when security related functional requirements can be included on futur milestones.
Reaching by DM in parallel.
Regards

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We’ve been following the discussions on XCM tracking and bridges and want to highlight a critical point: handling XCM complexities is one of the toughest challenges in this space. One we’ve already solved in practice.

These complexities aren’t obvious upfront, but they have a big impact down the line. We’re happy to share our real-world insights to help ensure the conversation stays grounded in experience.

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Heye Lets Cross Chain, nice project.

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