Ethereum
Building the interconnected Internet of Blockchains
Since the advent of Bitcoin In 2009 and the explosion of innovation that followed, the Web3 industry faced many challenges. Beyond dealing with regulators, improving UX, and eliminating bad actors, blockchain engineers continue to tackle two major hurdles: scalability and interoperability.
While many layer 2s strive to scale layer 1s like Bitcoin and Ethereum by improving throughput and reducing transaction fees, protocols like union enable both: large-scale interoperability.
The need for blockchain interoperability
Whatever your opinion on the WEF, it’s 2020 white paper on blockchain interoperability hit the nail on the head when he said: “Organizations don’t want to end up on a blockchain platform that could limit their external collaboration options in the future. »
To expand on this point, imagine you have a Gmail account, you send a message to a Yahoo account, and you cannot exchange communications. The Internet was able to grow so quickly because it took interoperability into account from the beginning, and blockchains must do the same.
A notable player in the field of interoperability is Cosmos, whose flagship Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol has enabled a multitude of sovereign chains to connect, transact, swap, tokenize, and perform other actions without compromising the sovereignty. The zone map is displayed 91 areas now connected through IBC, transacting over $2.1 billion in the last 30 days in over 8.7 million transactions.
IBC is not limited to Cosmos channels either. The trustless interoperability protocol has expanded its scope to include EVM-enabled chains such as Ethereum, Polygon, and Avalanche. However, until now, most bridging solutions have been offered by centralized providers, meaning users must trust the bridging protocol.
Built and backed by Composable Finance, Consensys, Tokensoft and Polygon Labs, Union provides a permissionless bridging protocol that connects modular blockchains and rollups with confidence, without relying on trusted third parties, oracles, multi-signatures or of MPC, using advanced zero knowledge. (ZK) cryptography.
Already connecting multiple ecosystems, Union recently announced a partnership with L2 developer Polygon Labs that will leverage Polygon’s AggLayer “to facilitate message passing and asset transfers between the Polygon ecosystem and IBC-enabled chains,” connecting two of the largest blockchain ecosystems: Polygon and Cosmos.
Unauthorized linking to Polygon, Cosmos and beyond
Founder of Union and former CTO at Composable Finance Karel Kubat told CryptoSlate: “It’s not just a Cosmos to Polygon bridge, but anything IBC compatible, which includes Scroll, and soon Arbitrum, Berrachain, Movement Labs, M2… They can build and connect to the Agglayer using Union”, permissionlessly exploiting the liquidity of one of the largest blockchain layers 1, Ethereum.
“Right now it’s very interesting because we have large L1 ecosystems that really only have centralized bridges allowed or something in between. You need to go to the bridge provider for help for a small ecosystem. What Union does is that if you create a new Cosmos channel or a new IBC-enabled rollup, you don’t need to go to a centralized provider for help. All you have to do is open the connection to Ethereum and that’s it… We go quite quickly from a world with only 200 to 300 ecosystems to a world with thousands and thousands.
This type of seamless interoperability is not possible with centralized solutions because the “queue” is too long. Each chain wishing to connect must request permission from the bridging protocol.
With Union, chains can open a permissionless channel with Ethereum, enabling a seamlessly interconnected future… of potentially millions of chains. Karel gives the example of dYdX, one of the largest decentralized exchanges that started as a smart contract on Ethereum and moved ecosystems to become a sovereign Cosmos application chain.
“We all turned to crypto for sovereignty,” he says. “Any successful smart contract considers accessing its own L2 or application chain.” This means that the total addressable market for the Union is potentially large. “No one wants to build a blockchain. Any existing application on Ethereum and Solana could benefit from this decision.
The IBC Bridge to Union Polygon is expected to be completed by the end of this year and you can keep up to date with the latest developments by following Union on X.