ZetaLabs lets you contribute to the ZetaChain blockchain development by testing with omnichain dApps built on the ZetaChain Testnet. Contributors can invite others to join and test the various products on ZetaLabs to earn ZETA points which track your progress as a tester.

ZetaChain is the world's first and only blockchain that connects everything. It facilitates cross-chain and cross-layer value transfer, message delivery, and smart contract calls — thus enabling for the first time omnichain dApps (odApps) which can leverage liquidity on multiple networks and read and update states on all connected networks.

Surely, Kravi is not alone. His story reflects the experience of many crypto users and that of broader society for that matter. We have a real lack of interoperability across systems, and it impacts the way institutions transfer data, value, and messages. In the crypto sphere, an absence of interoperability is felt across the existing and growing number of blockchain ecosystems, each with its customs and “rules of the road”. A future without blockchain interoperability is akin to the Internet before TCP/IP. It creates a real barrier to mass adoption.

Over the past few weeks, we embarked on a quest to understand how crypto users think about the current and future state of blockchain interoperability. We launched a writing contest on the topic and received over 60 submissions from across the globe. What we found is that poor interoperability does seem to be a major bottleneck plaguing users and developers. In this article, we shine a light on these stories, insights, and predictions about the future of blockchain.

What good is a multichain world without interoperability?

Article submissions revealed a strong belief by crypto users that the future of blockchain is multichain. “While some people tend to favor one blockchain to rule them all”, says contest winner Thelayer3guy, “it’s becoming increasingly clear that the future of the ecosystem will be made up of multiple blockchains” [2]. At the same time, despite greater blockchain optionality, it remains challenging for users to conveniently interact across them. Emmanuel Akubuilo writes, “Currently, we are in an era of blockchain proliferation…”, but, today, and since blockchain’s inception, it’s always been an issue to efficiently, affordably, and safely transfer value from one chain to another [3].

Another contest winner Haggs points out that the challenge starts at the development level. He says projects are “limited to the blockchains where they operate. And even though they can launch their protocol on multiple chains, interoperability between them is very complicated” [4]. The result is something like the graphic below by Daoordao where neither the user’s wallets, the contracts, nor the network truly spans across chains [5]. The user experience is something like having four log-ins. Both authors identify how fragmented development, by natural extension, leads to fragmented end-user experience.

In so many words, the majority of authors expressed frustration with the current landscape of cross-chain solutions. Even so, they remained idealistic in their thinking that crypto users in the future will be able to operate across different ecosystems seamlessly.

The continuum of interoperability solutions

Blockchain interoperability is not a set rule book. Many solutions, precipitated by the influx of alternative Layer 1 blockchains, attempt interoperability. As Om Singh so eloquently points out, blockchain interoperability ”refers to a broad range of techniques that allow different blockchains to listen to each other, transfer digital assets and data between one another, and enable better collaboration” [6]. Singh helps us realize interoperability is not simply a yes or no categorization. Rather, it’s more appropriate to think of it as various features along several continuous dimensions.

Challenges in cross-chain

The problem with standard cross-chain approaches such as token bridges is that users are subject to high fees, delayed transaction settlement, and worst of all, potentially lost assets from hacks. For these reasons, the word “cross-chain” carries a negative connotation and is a hot area of contention among prominent crypto figures.

Vitalik Buterin correctly argues bridges that lock assets introduce a ton of risk and interdependencies. What happens behind the scenes is that most bridges wrap tokens into synthetic assets that are effectively an “I owe you” on assets parked at the bridge. Contest winner and crypto blogger Yakugakusei writes, “Cross-chaining is problematic because it means that a lot of money is gathered at the bridge, and hackers have an ever-increasing incentive to attack there” [7].

And attack they have. Lucky Ducky cites examples of recent bridge exploits including Ronin Bridge at 620 million USD, Poly Network at 610 million USD, and Wormhole at 325 million USD [8] (Source: Coin98 Insights). Undeniably, these are not trivial events. They raise important questions about security and the future of multichain.

Advancing toward interoperability

Emerging from the rumble caused by questionable cross-chain solutions are some pretty remarkable new multi-chain developments. For example, in the realm of cross-chain communication is the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) module. For chains that adopt it, IBC establishes strong interoperability between sovereign blockchains such that it can support coin transfers, atomic swaps, cross-chain DEXs, and even cross-chain smart contracts. The catch is that the protocol only works with compatible blockchains that adopt IBC. Therefore, IBC cannot extend to non-smart contract chains such as Bitcoin and is not future proof-against new chains with their own consensus mechanism. Several other approaches and projects aim to provide more generalized inter-blockchain connectivity, but they either use questionable trust models or are limited in their genericness.

Filling the gap with ZetaChain

ZetaChain blockchain offers the first public, decentralized, and permissionless cross-chain smart contract platform that connects to any existing or future blockchain and layer. You can think of it as a programmable public computer that directly reads and updates the status on all connected networks — a blockchain for all important blockchains — with anti-fragmentation at its core.

A couple of important features make ZetaChain inherently agnostic. First, it supports externally managed smart contract capabilities meaning it can access and manipulate assets on any chain including even non-smart contract capable chains such as Bitcoin and Dogecoin. Secondly, it offers developers a single, trustless environment to build, deploy, and maintain dApps that natively work across any chain. For existing smart contracts, developers can add a few lines of code to transform their dApps into “omnichain dApps” or odApps. These techniques circumvent the need for ZetaChain to wrap tokens or bridge assets.

Native cross-chain asset swap

You could imagine a plethora of odApp ideas made possible by an all-purpose cross-chain smart contract platform. From AMM exchanges to omnichain governance tools and NFT ownership transfer, the possibilities are limitless. Ultimately, one very foundational use case will influence the next generation of odApps, that is, native cross-chain value transfer. Camillo777’s creative article submission analogizes ZetaChain’s one-way peg design and revert function for cross-chain swaps to cosmic space travel. Let’s take a look at what he calls, ZetaChain Logistics [10]:

Need to safely move your assets from one planet to another? Ask the ZetaChain Logistics protocol! We safely and automatically transfer your assets (tokens, NFTs) to the destination planet. Our ZetaChain Connector shop handles all of the fees, gas, and cross-planet transactions for you.

We have the licenses to lift off and land on every planet across the galaxy as we natively connect to all of them (even Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Monero). You just need to pay with $ZETA tokens, which allows our spaceships to fly. You can track the shipping in real-time with our blockchain Explorer app (AKA ZetaScan), making the shipping status fully transparent and explorable.

Our spaceships are atomic: if we cannot land on the destination planet because of traffic or prohibitively high fees, then the payload is automatically and safely reverted to the starting location. We don’t ship wrapped assets to the destination; we ship your original assets!

We use the latest, state-of-the-art spaceships and technologies: Proof of Stake (PoS), Cosmos SDK, Tendermint PBFT consensus engine, standard ECDSA/EdDSA keys, with multi-party threshold signature scheme (TSS).

For more information on the technicalities of ZetaChain Logistics, please refer to the spaceship manual (ZetaChain whitepaper).

Revisiting Kravi’s swap experience

With the first native cross-chain swap app on the horizon, it makes you think back to Kravi’s crypto bridging experience and how things could have gone better. In fact, before his story concludes, Kravi ponders what it would have been like if he had ZetaChain [1]:

“Gas fees for cross-chain transactions can be step/bundled and paid in ZETA coins (which can be issued natively across any blockchain) at the time of initiating.” Kravi states, “there would not have been a transaction fail on Ethereum, due to lack of enough balance… it would have been a breeze!”. It also would have meant “seamless transfer of funds to my custodial wallets/trading accounts, from where, I would have been able to transfer to my bank accounts anytime.” With ZetaChain, “I can swap onto any coin, and more importantly onto any blockchain, and I would have a vast array of DeFi options across different chains… that’s giving me goosebumps.” Kravi concludes, “…most of the issues I faced, as someone new to the crypto space, will soon be a thing of the past.”

Join our community

A new wave of omnichain dApps powered by ZetaChain is coming. We invite you to join our Discord community and follow ZetaChain on Twitter @zetablockchain so you can partake in testing this next generation of groundbreaking crypto products.

About ZetaChain

ZetaChain is the foundational layer to a multichain future. The novel blockchain enables multichain functionality without using bridges or wrapped tokens and the easy deployment of omnichain-dApps, or odApps. These applications can manage and connect data and value across all smart contract platforms as well as non-smart contract platforms like Bitcoin and Dogecoin.

The network is down. What do I do now? Can I still earn points?

The Testnet will periodically undergo upgrades and stress testing as it is under active development. If the network is down, transactions may not go through successfully. During these periods, transaction-based points earning will not be possible. However, you may still earn points through non-transaction-based actions like inviting other testers to ZetaLabs.

One solution is to never lock any tokens in an escrow address. ZetaChain transfers tokens from chain A to chain B where A and B are non-ZetaChain chains. The protocol never holds any tokens in custody.

While Bitcoin is conceptually a simple ledger (ordered sequence of transactions) with basic scripting features that has served as the canonical example of a blockchain, it is not the limit of what a blockchain can do. For example, due to the limited scope of the verification function of the Bitcoin protocol, its not possible to issue new coins on the Bitcoin network. The Bitcoin network is not programmable in the sense that an arbitrary state transition function can be implemented. The only state transition function that Bitcoin supports is the hard-coded UTXO set change. In summary, no applications other than BTC currency can piggy-back on the Bitcoin network, inheriting its consensus, decentralization, and security. To extend the scope of blockchain to support Turing-complete programmability, Ethereum was born. Ethereum borrows the Proof-of-Work from Bitcoin for its consensus, and has made several important innovations that make it a public programmable blockchain. First, Ethereum defines a virtual machine (EVM) that provides a Turing-complete sandbox environment to specify arbitrary state transition functions (smart contracts). Second, Ethereum moves away from the UTXO model in Bitcoin to an account-based system where account stores state. There are two kinds of accounts: External Owned Accounts (EOA) which are controlled by a private key, and smart contract accounts which work autonomously according to their own logic. The availability of smart contracts on Ethereum makes it one of the most widely used dApp blockchains with thousands of applications deployed, such as financial derivatives, exchanges, NFTs, gambling, and games. Smart contracts on Ethereum are like objects in an object-oriented programming language where state can be stored and functions can be called to change its state. Users can interact with smart contracts by sending messages to it, and smart contracts can also send messages to other smart contracts (invoking) to change their state. The smart contracts can enable very complex applications, and can enable some very powerful operations such as flash-loans or flash-swaps that have no analogy in non-blockchain applications. This is made possible by the powerful atomicity of transaction that invokes smart contract functions: it either completes or completely reverts. Over the years more and more blockchains such as Polkadot, Solana, Avalanche, and Cosmos have arisen and support nearly Turing-complete smart contracts.

Watching the tweeter of the project, I am active in the development, I also recommend friends and acquaintances to dive into this zetachain project. First of all, working with the project, I vigilantly follow the news of the project and the events associated with it, communicating with the guys from the community, we come to the same opinion ZetaChain is the project of the future in cryptocurrency. My experience in the testnet showed that for registration they give 7000 coins, they are an indicator of activity in the project. At the moment the test network has a network swap (Network Contracts: Goerli BSC Testnet Polygon Mumbai) in the discord sociable community and moderators are always ready to help you. I can also give you advice to perform other activities to support the project for which you can get a role in the discord and NFT all the links on the site I indicated below.

ZetaChain lets developers write and deploy EVM-compatible smart contracts on ZetaChain that have access to ZetaChain’s universal connectivity. This means developers can leverage the existing robust Ethereum smart contract ecosystem and build truly interoperable applications on top of ZetaChain — as if everything were on a single chain. Omnichain smart contracts enable a new paradigm of application building as ZetaChain easily manages and orchestrates native assets on all connected chains in a single place.

Twitter - https://twitter.com/zetablockchain

Discord - https://discord.com/invite/kjQBqcZtnh