English

ASAS-BridgeAMM: Trust-Minimized Cross-Chain Bridge AMM with Failure Containment

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing 2026-01-21 v1 Cryptography and Security

Abstract

Cross-chain bridges constitute the single largest vector of systemic risk in Decentralized Finance (DeFi), accounting for over $2.8 billion in losses since 2021. The fundamental vulnerability lies in the binary nature of existing bridge security models: a bridge is either fully operational or catastrophically compromised, with no intermediate state to contain partial failures. We present ASAS-BridgeAMM, a bridge-coupled automated market maker that introduces Contained Degradation: a formally specified operational state where the system gracefully degrades functionality in response to adversarial signals. By treating cross-chain message latency as a quantifiable execution risk, the protocol dynamically adjusts collateral haircuts, slippage bounds, and withdrawal limits. Across 18 months of historical replay on Ethereum and two auxiliary chains, ASAS-BridgeAMM reduces worst-case bridge-induced insolvency by 73% relative to baseline mint-and-burn architectures, while preserving 104.5% of transaction volume during stress periods. In rigorous adversarial simulations involving delayed finality, oracle manipulation, and liquidity griefing, the protocol maintains solvency with probability >0.9999>0.9999 and bounds per-epoch bad debt to <0.2<0.2% of total collateral. We provide a reference implementation in Solidity and formally prove safety (bounded debt), liveness (settlement completion), and manipulation resistance under a Byzantine relayer model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.12434,
  title  = {ASAS-BridgeAMM: Trust-Minimized Cross-Chain Bridge AMM with Failure Containment},
  author = {Shengwei You and Aditya Joshi and Andrey Kuehlkamp and Jarek Nabrzyski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.12434},
  year   = {2026}
}