IBC, the original validity bridge

"Good evening. Tonight we cover ibc light clients in practice. This is the kind of topic that sits right on the seam between research and production, and we're going to walk through the construction before looking at what it means for the chains that actually ship it."

"The short version is this: IBC is the original validity bridge. We'll spend the first half of the segment on the core mechanism, and the second half on what operators are actually deploying."

"Let's start with the basics. Every connected chain runs a light client of the counterparty chain on-chain, so cross-chain packets are verified against counterparty consensus instead of against an external committee. The Tendermint light client - the most common one - only needs a signed header and a proof against the corresponding Merkle root. Keep that in mind as we go deeper."