Polymer, an Ethereum rollup that’s hoping to turn out to be Ethereum’s interoperability hub, has launched the Polyverse Testnet, changing into the newest workforce hoping to deal with blockchain interoperability.
The testnet will probably be launched in three phases dubbed ‘Basecamp,’ ‘Into the Unknown’ and ‘Discovery.’ The primary part, Basecamp, will probably be reside beginning in the present day 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 be capable to obtain rewards. Then the ultimate part, Discovery, will concentrate on refining and optimizing incentive mechanisms to drive participation.
The blockchain interoperability drawback
Like many cross-chain messaging and bridging protocols in the present day, Polymer was created to resolve the difficulty of blockchain interoperability.
Learn extra: Interoperability isn’t only a buzzword
Blockchain ecosystems in the present day stay comparatively remoted from each other, that means they can’t talk or work together with one another — creating horrible consumer experiences for his or her prospects.
An instance of this in Web2 could 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 useful data to one another.
This sort of infrastructure is vital to blockchain scaling, as evidenced by the eye and curiosity it has obtained from traders.
Wormhole, one of many largest cross-chain messaging options in the present day, secured $225 million in a personal token sale, which noticed curiosity from Brevan Howard, Coinbase Ventures and Multicoin Capital late final 12 months.
Equally, LayerZero locked in a seven-figure Sequence B fundraise, the place traders from a16z, OKX Ventures and Sequoia Capital gave the protocol $120 million to increase 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 in the present day, Polymer shouldn’t be designed as a third-party bridge however quite as a layer-2 Ethereum rollup answer that serves an identical goal to the ‘interoperability hub’ on Cosmos. It goals to offer IBC to Ethereum and join with different layer-2 options.
IBC, not like many different interoperability options in the present day, shouldn’t be a bridge utility however a community customary, Devain Pal Bansal, a product analyst at Polymer Labs, advised Blockworks.
“The most important good thing about introducing it to Ethereum, notably Ethereum rollups, is that it extends the capabilities of how a rollup settles on Ethereum through the native bridge and extends it cross rollups – and not using a third occasion required to attest to knowledge or its validity by merely utilizing the shared supply of fact for all rollups – Ethereum,’ Bansal stated.
Tommy O’Connell, a senior product supervisor at Polymer, defined to Blockworks that purposes 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 occasion.
“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 progress,” O’Connell stated.
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’s also completely different from Axelar, which depends on validators for attestations.
It is very important be aware, nonetheless, that Polymer’s minimal viable product (MVP) will probably be restricted to the Base and Optimism on the testnet launch.
Although that is the case, O’Connell notes that there are speedy plans to develop to different OP stack chains and shortly after to different chains reminiscent of these within the Cosmos ecosystem.
“The first profit for OP stack rollups is that we have now constructed an IBC shopper 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 are able to unlock different chains constructed on the OP stack with minimal enlargement effort,” O’Connell stated.
