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Centauri: trustless cross-ecosystem bridging

The first cross-ecosystem implementation of IBC — moving assets and information between blockchains without a trusted intermediary.

Centauri is Composable Finance's trustless bridge — the first cross-ecosystem implementation of IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication). It lets assets and information move between blockchains and ecosystems that are otherwise fragmented or connected only through trusted, custodial bridges.

Why trustless bridging matters

Most bridges rely on a trusted intermediary — a multisig, a federation, or a custodian — that holds funds and can be compromised. Centauri removes that trust assumption. By extending IBC beyond its origin in the Cosmos ecosystem, transfers are validated by light clients and on-chain proofs rather than by a privileged set of signers.

What has Centauri connected?

  • Kusama and Cosmos. The first live Centauri route ran between the Picasso parachain on Kusama and Osmosis, the largest exchange in the Cosmos ecosystem. It was the first IBC connection outside Cosmos.
  • Polkadot, Kusama and Cosmos. On 29 June 2023 the connection was extended to Polkadot, opening trust-minimised transfers between 46+ IBC-enabled Cosmos chains and 80+ Polkadot and Kusama parachains.
  • Ethereum. The Ethereum IBC connection went live on mainnet on 3 April 2024.
  • Solana. IBC reached Solana in 2024 through a guest blockchain that supplies the state proofs Solana cannot produce natively.

How Centauri works

IBC only works if each chain can verify the other's consensus. Cosmos chains share Tendermint consensus, so one light client covers them all. Polkadot finalises blocks with a different gadget called GRANDPA, which no Cosmos chain could read. Composable contributors designed a GRANDPA light client and helped rebuild the IBC Wasm client (ICS-08) with Strangelove, so the GRANDPA client can run as a Wasm contract on a Cosmos chain without a hard fork. That contract is what Centauri uses in production.

Bridges facilitate both asset transfer and information transfer between chains. The trustless bridging technology behind Centauri is combined with our Cross-Chain Virtual Machine (XCVM) and our pallets so that interoperability is native to the stack rather than an add-on. Like any IBC connection, Centauri supports fungible and non-fungible token transfers, generic messages and cross-chain contract calls.

What trustless does and does not mean

  • No company or committee can move funds in transit; escrow is controlled by chain logic.
  • Relayers carry packets but cannot forge them, and a packet that is never delivered is refunded after its timeout.
  • You still depend on the security of the chains at both ends and on correct light-client code.

Where Centauri fits

Centauri is one of the core elements of Composable Finance, settling and routing through the Picasso parachain. To understand the protocol it builds on, read What is IBC?