Composable Research
Our deep-tech cryptography wing — credentialed engineers tackling the hard, long-horizon problems the market tends to ignore.
Composable Research is the deep-tech cryptography wing of Composable Finance. Our team of highly credentialed engineers tackles the difficult, long-horizon problems that the market tends to ignore — contributing to research, blockchain theory, and academic publications across the technical domains that move Web3 forward.
What we work on
- Trustless interoperability — the cryptography behind cross-ecosystem IBC and light-client bridging.
- Cross-chain execution — the theory underpinning the XCVM and asynchronous, multi-chain protocols.
- Security — formal approaches to making Centauri and the wider stack resistant to the failure modes that plague custodial bridges.
Example: reading Polkadot finality from Cosmos
IBC needs each chain to verify the other's consensus. Cosmos chains understand Tendermint, but Polkadot finalises blocks with GRANDPA. At the end of 2022 Composable took over the draft specification for the IBC Wasm light client (ICS-08), which lets a chain load a light client as a Wasm contract instead of hard-coding it, and rebuilt the implementation with Strangelove. Composable contributors then designed the GRANDPA light client contract that runs on it. That work is what allowed Centauri to connect Polkadot to Cosmos in production.
The open problems
- Chains without light clients. Some chains cannot cheaply verify another chain's state. For Solana, the answer was a guest blockchain that produces the proofs IBC needs.
- Cost of verification. Checking signatures and proofs on-chain costs gas, especially on Ethereum. Cheaper verification makes more routes practical.
- Failure across chains. A multi-chain action can succeed on one chain and fail on the next. Safe rollback and callbacks are an execution problem, not just a transport one.
Research that ships
Composable Research is not an ivory tower. Findings flow directly into the pallets built by Composable Labs and deployed on Picasso, closing the loop between theory and production infrastructure.
Composable Research anchors the Learn pillar of Composable Finance.