Polymer, an Ethereum rollup that’s hoping to grow to be Ethereum’s interoperability hub, has launched the Polyverse Testnet, turning into the newest staff hoping to deal with blockchain interoperability.
The testnet shall be launched in three phases dubbed ‘Basecamp,’ ‘Into the Unknown’ and ‘Discovery.’ The primary section, Basecamp, shall be stay 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 may also be capable to obtain rewards. Then the ultimate section, 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, which means they cannot talk or work together with one another — creating horrible person experiences for his or her clients.
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 soundly switch helpful data to one another.
Such a infrastructure is crucial 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 not too long ago revealed that it acquired $23 million to carry Cosmos SDK’s inter-blockchain communication (IBC) protocol to Ethereum.
Learn Extra: Polymer Labs secures $23M to carry 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 relatively as a layer-2 Ethereum rollup resolution that serves the same 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, just isn’t a bridge software however a community commonplace, Devain Pal Bansal, a product analyst at Polymer Labs, advised Blockworks.
“The largest 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 – with no third get together required to attest to knowledge or its validity by merely utilizing the shared supply of reality for all rollups – Ethereum,’ Bansal stated.
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 hitch Polymer’s ecosystem of chains with only a SINGLE connection to the hub, mitigating Polymer being a blocker for development,” 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 totally different from Axelar, which depends on validators for attestations.
It is very important observe, nonetheless, 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 reminiscent of these within the Cosmos ecosystem.
“The first profit for OP stack rollups is that we’ve 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 growth effort,” O’Connell stated.