Since the advent of Bitcoin in 2009 and the subsequent explosion of innovation, the Web3 industry has faced many challenges. Beyond dealing with regulators, improving UX, and eliminating bad actors, blockchain engineers continue to tackle his two biggest hurdles: scalability and interoperability.
Many Layer 2s are working to extend Layer 1s such as Bitcoin and Ethereum by increasing throughput and reducing transaction fees. Union interoperability at scale.
The need for blockchain interoperability
Whatever your opinion on the WEF, in 2020 white paper Regarding blockchain interoperability, he hit the nail on the head when he said, “Organizations don't want to be on a blockchain platform that could limit their options for external collaboration in the future.”
To further explain this point, imagine you have a Gmail account and you send a message to your Yahoo account, but the communication doesn't work. The Internet has been able to develop so quickly because interoperability was considered from the beginning, and blockchain must do the same.
A notable player in the interoperability space is Cosmos. Cosmos’ flagship Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol allows numerous sovereign chains to connect, trade, exchange, exchange, and perform other actions without compromising sovereignty.A map of the zone will be displayed 91 zone Currently connected via IBC, over $2.1 billion has been traded on over 8.7 million trades in the past 30 days.
IBC is not limited to the Cosmos chain. Trustless Interoperability Protocol has expanded its scope to include his EVM-compatible chains such as Ethereum, Polygon, and Avalanche. However, most bridging solutions to date are provided by centralized providers and require users to trust the bridging protocol.
Built and backed by Composable Finance, Consensys, Tokensoft, and Polygon Labs, Union uses advanced zero-knowledge to create modular blockchain and Provides a permissionless bridging protocol that connects rollups trustlessly. (ZK) Encryption.
Union, which already connects several ecosystems, recently announced a partnership with L2 developer Polygon Labs. The partnership will leverage Polygon's AggLayer to “facilitate message passing and asset transfer between the Polygon ecosystem and IBC-enabled chains,” bridging the largest blockchain ecosystems, Polygon and Cosmos. become.
Bridge Polygon, Cosmos, and more without permission
Founder of Union and former CTO of Composable Finance Karel Kubat He told CryptoSlate, “It's not just a Cosmos to Polygon bridge, it's anything IBC-enabled, including Scroll, and soon that includes Arbitrum, Berrachain, Movement Labs, M2… They use Union. “You can build and connect Agglayer.” Ethereum liquidity, one of the largest blockchain layer 1.
“Right now, this is very interesting because we actually have a large L1 ecosystem with just authorized centralized bridges or things in between. We have support for smaller ecosystems. What Union does is that if you're building a new Cosmos chain or a new IBC-enabled rollup, you don't have to go to a central provider to get support. All you have to do is open a connection to Ethereum and you're done… So we're moving very quickly from a world where there are only 200 to 300 ecosystems to a world where there are thousands and thousands of ecosystems. There is.”
This kind of seamless interoperability is not possible with centralized solutions because the “wait queue” is too long. All chains that want to connect must request permission for the bridging protocol.
Union allows chains to open channels with Ethereum without permission, potentially enabling a future where millions of chains are seamlessly interconnected. Karel cited the example of dYdX, one of the largest decentralized exchanges that started as an Ethereum smart contract and transitioned its ecosystem to become a sovereign Cosmos app chain.
“We all got into cryptocurrencies for sovereignty,” he says. “Successful smart contracts are considering moving to their own L2 or app chain.” This means the overall addressable market for Union is potentially vast. “No one wants to build a blockchain. Existing apps on Ethereum and Solana are the ones that could benefit from this move.”
Union's IBC to Polygon bridge is expected to be completed by the end of this year. You can keep up with the latest development status in the following ways: Join on X.
