Interesting thoughts! We have thought about further integrations as well as part of the motion proposal on “General Integration” (Long Term R&D: General Integration (Proposal) - #9 by dieter.sommer) as this is important to bring other cryptocurrencies into the IC for use cases such as decentralized exchanges. The question is, how exactly to bring those cryptocurrencies over. There are multiple ways of doing so, and we should discuss what the community feels should be the way to go:
- Bridging ERC-20 coins that already exist in Ethereum: weak trust model as we rely on bridges, but readily available soon (e.g., through the Terabethia bridge)
- Bridging individual coins: trust assumptions of a bridge; can be done by the community
- Relay-based integration: Integrating a cryptocurrency via a relay-based integration, where reliance on the externally-operated relay is mainly for availability. Using threshold ECDSA ensures a still rather strong trust model as no party holds the signing key for transferring cryptocurrency coins; this would not require extensions to the IC protocol stack and could thus be done by the community, based on a blueprint and maybe reference implementation by the Foundation
- Direct integration: integration a la Bitcoin; strongest possible trust model; can only be done by the Foundation; this would only be feasible in case we can reuse the Bitcoin implementation more or less completely and parameterize it for each currency and enable it on given subnets (does anyone here have experience how similar / different the currencies interesting to us are to Bitcoin)
The above is early thinking, but can be a trigger for some broader discussions about what people expect to have.