Polymer, an Ethereum rollup that’s hoping to change into Ethereum’s interoperability hub, has launched the Polyverse Testnet, turning into the newest staff hoping to sort out blockchain interoperability.
The testnet might be launched in three phases dubbed ‘Basecamp,’ ‘Into the Unknown’ and ‘Discovery.’ The primary part, Basecamp, might be dwell beginning as we speak and is designed to incentivize builders to facilitate liquidity onto the testnet from different rollups.
Part 2, Into the Unknown, will start the next week, the place Polymer will choose a handful of decentralized apps to advertise to finish customers, who will even have the ability to obtain rewards. Then the ultimate part, Discovery, will give attention to refining and optimizing incentive mechanisms to drive participation.
The blockchain interoperability downside
Like many cross-chain messaging and bridging protocols as we speak, Polymer was created to resolve the difficulty of blockchain interoperability.
Learn extra: Interoperability isn’t only a buzzword
Blockchain ecosystems as we speak stay comparatively remoted from each other, that means they cannot talk or work together with one another — creating horrible consumer experiences for his or her prospects.
An instance of this in Web2 can be being unable to ship emails out of your Gmail account to an Outlook account.
To handle the communication barrier, cross-chain messaging protocols and different interoperability options have sprung into life as a method to allow blockchains to securely switch helpful info to one another.
Any such infrastructure is essential to blockchain scaling, as evidenced by the eye and curiosity it has acquired from buyers.
Wormhole, one of many largest cross-chain messaging options as we speak, secured $225 million in a non-public token sale, which noticed curiosity from Brevan Howard, Coinbase Ventures and Multicoin Capital late final yr.
Equally, LayerZero locked in a seven-figure Collection B fundraise, the place buyers from a16z, OKX Ventures and Sequoia Capital gave the protocol $120 million to broaden its operations.
Polymer additionally lately revealed that it acquired $23 million to deliver Cosmos SDK’s inter-blockchain communication (IBC) protocol to Ethereum.
Learn Extra: Polymer Labs secures $23M to deliver IBC to Ethereum
Polymer’s approaches to interoperability
In contrast to many interoperability protocols as we speak, Polymer will not be designed as a third-party bridge however fairly as a layer-2 Ethereum rollup resolution that serves an analogous objective to the ‘interoperability hub’ on Cosmos. It goals to supply IBC to Ethereum and join with different layer-2 options.
IBC, in contrast to many different interoperability options as we speak, will not be a bridge utility however a community commonplace, Devain Pal Bansal, a product analyst at Polymer Labs, advised Blockworks.
“The most important advantage of introducing it to Ethereum, notably Ethereum rollups, is that it extends the capabilities of how a rollup settles on Ethereum by way of the native bridge and extends it cross rollups – with no third get together required to attest to knowledge or its validity by merely utilizing the shared supply of fact for all rollups – Ethereum,’ Bansal mentioned.
Tommy O’Connell, a senior product supervisor at Polymer, defined to Blockworks that functions can construct their very own bridges and management inbound and outbound messages utilizing a layer-1 belief layer. This eliminates the necessity for an extra belief assumption of a 3rd get together.
“This additionally permits us to be targeted on enabling chains to affix Polymer’s ecosystem of chains with only a SINGLE connection to the hub, mitigating Polymer being a blocker for development,” O’Connell mentioned.
This differs from Wormhole, for instance, which depends on a 13 of 19 supermajority to attest to a message earlier than it’s produced or despatched. It is usually completely different from Axelar, which depends on validators for attestations.
You will need to notice, nonetheless, that Polymer’s minimal viable product (MVP) might be restricted to the Base and Optimism on the testnet launch.
Although that is the case, O’Connell notes that there are instant plans to develop to different OP stack chains and shortly after to different chains comparable to these within the Cosmos ecosystem.
“The first profit for OP stack rollups is that now we have constructed an IBC consumer for OP geth, which permits us to increase the capabilities of native L1<>L2 bridge throughout rollups. It’s notably interesting as a result of we will unlock different chains constructed on the OP stack with minimal growth effort,” O’Connell mentioned.