🔗Blockchain Interoperability is Broken
There are currently different blockchains: Ethereum, Polkadot, Avalanche, Polygon, Solana, etc. They all serve practically the same target audience or user, which is further sub-niched.
However, these blockchains do not interact with each other natively. This inability to cross-communicate is a huge disadvantage, from a wider point of view, for the ecosystem as a whole.
Notably, blockchain is a new industry with huge centralized competitors on various fronts. Thus, it will be detrimental for this relatively new industry to compartmentalize itself away from the overall industry structure.
There are a few reasons these blockchains cannot interact:
Difference in Protocol Logic In protocol engineering, protocol logic is how software is designed to be, perform, and respond. This is largely determined by the building team behind such protocols.
Going first with Ethereum, it was designed for crypto projects to be built on it and for the blockchain to operate with the proof-of-work consensus mechanism, even though it presently uses the proof-of-stake mechanism in Serenity.
Interestingly, the blockchain has undergone several changes over the last few years and is bound to undergo more, as its roadmap clearly states.
In consonance with its logic, it also supports layer-2 blockchains, which leverage its security but can have separate execution and consensus layers. Primarily, the layer-2 solutions are not absolutely independent of Ethereum.
Another noteworthy blockchain is Solana, which uses the proof-of-stake mechanism. Its protocol design enables it to process smart contracts and NFT compression parallelly, among other things.
This sharp difference in most blockchains' protocol logic is why they cannot interact; they were not made for exactly the same purposes.
Logically and empirically, two people who speak different languages—without a means of interpretation—cannot communicate as the language of one does not make meaning to another.
In traditional software engineering, mobile Android apps built with Flutter cannot interact with iOS apps built with Swift.
Back to blockchain, the linguistic differences is in two forms: the language of creation and the language of operation.
Cosmos, for example, is a blockchain heavily built in Go. In contrast, blockchains like Bitcoin were majorly built with C++. That is their language of creation. Notably, these blockchains operate with different languages: Cosmos, Rust; Bitcoin, Clarity.
This linguistic dichotomy is another major reason behind the inability of blockchains to be interoperable.
It is an open secret that various blockchains cannot interact due to the above-mentioned inconsistencies.
Thus, expecting a bridge or protocol that connects with these isolated blockchains is natural. However, there is none.
More specifically, no protocol bridges the gap between the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) ecosystem and that of the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) ecosystem.
Protocols that appear to offer this solution do not, as we shall later see in this documentation. There are protocols that bridge assets from Base to Ethereum, but none currently bridges from Dymension to Ethereum.
In a nutshell, the current bridging protocols operate and end on a protocol level, not ecosystemic, which is a disservice to the overall growth and high-level inter-relation of the blockchain industry.
Assets and Data Transfer Chasm Between EVM and IBC
This problem is an off-shoot of the interoperability problem; due to the interoperability of blockchains, assets and data cannot be transferred from one major ecosystem to another.
A chasm has been blocking off the IBC and EVM ecosystems from each other for a long time.
Data proves the IBC ecosystem processed about $29 billion between early 2022 and 2023. While there might be no public data stating the financial strength of the EVM ecosystem in 2023, some Dune dashboards point to billions.
At this juncture, there is a greater possibility that the billions in these separate ecosystems can interplay for the greater good. This symbiotic relationship will strengthen both ecosystems' financial strength and inter-commercial activities.
What is the way forward?
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