The tremendous progress of Polkadot and ETH2.0 in the second half of this year has set off a new round of public chain craze, and in the context of the ebb of DeFi, these two public chain IPs have become important support points to maintain the industry’s popularity.
The public chain is still an important abstraction of the ideal of decentralization
Public chains have always been built on extremely large narratives. These grand dreams have been repeatedly mentioned in the few years when blockchain technology has just become popular. Especially around 2018, you will find that most public chain project teams will play “Internet of Value”, “Fully Decentralized Open Source Network” and other ambitious slogans, but there is a clear mismatch between dreams and reality, and from the screening results at this stage, the industry’s attention is definitely more The actual Polkadot and ETH2.0 are out.
ETH2.0 ushered in the mainnet of the beacon chain, and finally took the first step in solving the problem of expansion. Polkadot has been engaged in “cross-chain” since its birth, and the Web3.0 network architecture led by Jarvan’s development has been further upgraded and iterated, and a parallel chain network foundation that can be expanded horizontally has been constructed. With the gradual landing of the two popular public chains, it has directly brought a lot of opportunities for different components such as protocols, tools, and communities in their own ecology. The construction of applications such as underlying protocols, wallets, and DEX are all in full swing.
Most importantly, the popularity of Polkadot and ETH2.0 is creating a middle ground. From the perspective of competition, this area is relatively vacuum.
Who is entering the middle ground between the two public chain IPs?
Where is the opportunity in this middle ground?
When facing Polkadot and ETH2.0, investors and developers often face a choice, whether it is Polkadot or Ethereum? How to bridge this gap will inevitably bring some new opportunities. This kind of opportunity will first occur in the financial field, and the key is the out-of-circle and cross-chain of assets.
In the industry, this kind of demand is usually fulfilled through transit bridges, cross-chain asset gateways, etc. Their working principle is from the perspective of technical realization, and needs to take into account the configuration of different demand sides for deployment. The amount of engineering is complex and huge. Here Let’s not explore the specific logic for now. Just use a more popular and routine travel abroad to explain, we all know that whenever we want to go abroad, one of the first problems to be solved is the problem of currency exchange, because the domestic currency cannot be circulated in other countries, then it is necessary here Institutions that can support currency exchange exist. In the real world, we call them banks.
The exchange demand in the real world is the same in the blockchain world, and the intermediate conversion role of the “bank” here is the bridge in our industry. Through them, the assets of Ethereum can be exchanged in There is a reasonable existence in Polkadot’s ecology, and the simultaneous introduction of assets or related resources not only further expands the “circle” of assets, but also further realizes different asset fission through cross-circle circulation. At present, such transfer bridges are mainly developed based on Polkadot. Zenlink, ChainX, Bifrost, Acala, Darwinia, Snowfork are all solving such things.
Solving the cross-chain problem of assets is the most basic step. After the flow is sufficient, more upper-layer applications are required to communicate to achieve cross-chain interconnection between business and information. This is mainly due to the current application, ecology, developer and other aspects. The construction of Ethereum is relatively advanced. Public chains such as Polkadot need such energy replenishment to achieve more convenient inter-chain interoperability, which has also given birth to Another section-the cross-chain of software applications, which is more biased towards the universality of software, is an adapter that is more than just an asset link and can realize interlocking application development.
Such products can be effectively extended to other chains, and the application space is quickly opened. Users can use mature smart contracts on Ethereum, one-click cross-chain operations, and rely on the interoperability of smart contracts to reduce the cost of multi-chain development. Multi-chain user sharing, data interconnection. At present, Polkadot has announced that the parachains compatible with Ethereum software include Plasm, Moobeam, and ParaState, and they use EVM, OVM, and Ewasm to realize their plans to be compatible with Ethereum software. Or provide a general Ethereum simulator for the Polkadot ecology, or do it on the Rollup layer of ETH2.0 to achieve compatibility with Ethereum Layer 2 smart contracts. ParaState directly follows the technical route of Polkadot and redevelops a WebAssembly virtual machine that meets the eWasm specification.
In short, according to the mainstream classification of the industry, it is mainly divided into asset cross-chain and software application cross-chain. It is true that the overall development of the project is still in its infancy at this stage and requires a long time of development and accumulation, but if the industry is mature enough, There will be a lot of opportunities that we can’t foresee, such as cross-chain credit, cross-chain identity, cross-chain games and other special products for different sectors.
What are the opportunities for compatible projects among public chains?
The reason why Polkadot has such success is that it has truly discovered the public chain environment that the market lacks. According to this logic, the above-mentioned project parties that are in the early stage of development and complement the public chain’s cooperation or potential areas, or are taking the lead in occupying the track or the future hard demand zone, their future industry status should not be underestimated. Through the inter-chain ecological resources communicated by them, the effect of 1+1=2 will no longer be brought about. On the basis of layered combination or combined development, it will continue to supplement inter-chain assets, data, property rights, information, and business. The degree of coupling between the two, the amount of value it releases will be unpredictable.
However, it is foreseeable that with the continuous enrichment and iterative update of such products, universal compatible products may represent the mainstream. They will be simplified to achieve a one-stop solution to cross-chain resource allocation, and build better and high-quality products. General-purpose products will provide a package solution for the advent of “inter-chain of all things and mutual-value”, and will inevitably exist as an indispensable “screw” among public chains and blockchain technologies.
