By ChainX & ComingChat CEO, GG
From 2017 to the present, I have been working in the field of blockchain cross-chain for 5 years, and I have also experienced the development and transformation of cross-chain technology. Cosmos and Polkadot were the first to focus on cross-chain, but if the term cross-chain is taken apart, they are actually only doing “chain” rather than focusing on “cross”. As a result of this, the ecosystems of Cosmos and Polkadot are relatively closed. It was not until the emergence of LayerZero and CCIP protocols that cross-chain got rid of the shackles of “chain” and refocused on the “cross” process.
As early as two years ago, ChainNet Technology Corporation has begun to apply for a patent for this kind of interconnection protocol between thousands of chains. It’s just that I personally prefer to do applications that can be truly implemented and users can use personally, rather than relatively vague protocols or concepts. In the interview with “Code Farm” four years ago, I expected that the explosion of blockchain applications would be 5 years later, that is, next year, when countless public chains will emerge, and they will support blockchain omnichain applications through cross-chain interoperability protocols. This means that the blockchain has begun to move from the stand-alone era to the internet application era.
Cross-chain interoperability protocols can be divided into two factions. Cosmos and Polkadot are homogeneous chain protocols, focusing on the “chain”. The other school is LayerZero and CCIP, which are interoperable protocols for heterogeneous chains with programmable messages, focusing on “cross”. Today, it seems that these two schools are like the Sword School and the Air School of the Huashan School.
As for the difference between Polkadot’s XCMP protocol and LayerZero, CCIP protocol, the most obvious difference is that the two have different purposes. XCMP is designed to solve message passing between Polkadot parachains. LayerZero and CCIP are designed to solve the interoperability problem between various existing chains. XCMP is similar to a local area network under a certain WiFi. And LayerZero and CCIP are similar to a large public network. Of course, isomorphic XCMP would be easier to implement in terms of security. It is not easy to implement a secure and reliable programmable message protocol between public heterogeneous chains. This is an order of magnitude more difficult than the XCMP protocol implementation.
The above accumulation and precipitation about cross-chain have laid a solid foundation for me to do omnichain applications. Now, we have an omnichain application OmniBTC that integrates the LayerZero protocol, and for users, the product form of OmniBTC is close to the Internet products we use today, rather than the previous experience of mobile phone products in the Nokia era.
Our products are omnichain and full-platform. For example, ComingChat is an omnichain wallet that supports all chains. Our Dapp, for example, is Cross-Dapp/Omni-Dapp, that is, from the underlying architecture, it is an application based on interoperability between any chains. This is not the same concept as the previous multi-chain applications (Multi-chain application is the repeated deployment of a complete application on multiple chains).
If we compare the development of the Internet to the blockchain industry, I think the products we are making are similar to the concept of Internet applications and not like the stand-alone products when the Internet was first introduced. I think Cross-Dapp/Omni-Dapp is the big trend. Just like the current Internet products do not depend on a single computer, the future blockchain products will be cross-network omnichain products formed by programming multiple chains to call each other.
