Polymer, an Ethereum rollup that’s hoping to change into Ethereum’s interoperability hub, has launched the Polyverse Testnet, turning into the most recent workforce hoping to sort out blockchain interoperability.
The testnet shall be launched in three phases dubbed ‘Basecamp,’ ‘Into the Unknown’ and ‘Discovery.’ The primary part, Basecamp, shall be dwell beginning as we speak and is designed to incentivize builders to facilitate liquidity onto the testnet from different rollups.
Section 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 of obtain rewards. Then the ultimate part, Discovery, will concentrate on 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 unravel the problem of blockchain interoperability.
Learn extra: Interoperability isn’t only a buzzword
Blockchain ecosystems as we speak stay comparatively remoted from each other, which 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 deal with the communication barrier, cross-chain messaging protocols and different interoperability options have sprung into life as a method to allow blockchains to securely switch invaluable info 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 as we speak, 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 broaden its operations.
Polymer additionally just 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 just isn’t designed as a third-party bridge however moderately as a layer-2 Ethereum rollup resolution that serves an identical objective to the ‘interoperability hub’ on Cosmos. It goals to offer IBC to Ethereum and join with different layer-2 options.
IBC, in contrast to many different interoperability options as we speak, just isn’t a bridge utility however a community customary, Devain Pal Bansal, a product analyst at Polymer Labs, instructed 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 by way of the native bridge and extends it cross rollups – with no third occasion 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 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 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. Additionally it is completely different from Axelar, which depends on validators for attestations.
It is very important be aware, nevertheless, that Polymer’s minimal viable product (MVP) shall 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 akin to these within the Cosmos ecosystem.
“The first profit for OP stack rollups is that we’ve constructed an IBC shopper for OP geth, which allows 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 growth effort,” O’Connell mentioned.
