Polymer, an Ethereum package that hopes to become Ethereum’s interoperability hub, has launched the Polyverse Testnet, becoming the latest team hoping to tackle blockchain interoperability.
The testnet will be launched in three phases, called ‘Basecamp’, ‘Into the Unknown’ and ‘Discovery’. The first phase, Basecamp, will go live starting today and is designed to incentivize developers to facilitate liquidity on the testnet from other rollups.
Phase 2, Into the Unknown, begins next week, where Polymer will select a handful of decentralized apps to promote to end users, who can also receive rewards. Then, the final phase, Discovery, will focus on refining and optimizing incentive mechanisms to encourage participation.
The blockchain interoperability problem
Like many cross-chain messaging and bridging protocols today, Polymer was created to solve the problem of blockchain interoperability.
Read more: Interoperability is not just a buzzword
Blockchain ecosystems today remain relatively isolated from each other, meaning they cannot communicate or interact with each other, creating terrible user experiences for their customers.
An example of this in Web2 is that you cannot send emails from your Gmail account to an Outlook account.
To address the communication barrier, cross-chain messaging protocols and other interoperability solutions have emerged as a means to enable blockchains to securely transfer valuable information to each other.
This type of infrastructure is critical to scaling blockchain, as evidenced by the attention and interest it has received from investors.
Wormhole, one of today’s largest cross-chain messaging solutions, has secured $225 million in a private token sale, which attracted interest late last year from Brevan Howard, Coinbase Ventures and Multicoin Capital.
Similarly, LayerZero closed a seven-figure Series B fundraising, with investors from a16z, OKX Ventures, and Sequoia Capital giving the protocol $120 million to expand its business.
Polymer also recently revealed that it has raised $23 million to bring Cosmos SDK’s inter-blockchain communications (IBC) protocol to Ethereum.
Read more: Polymer Labs raises $23 million to bring IBC to Ethereum
Polymer’s approaches to interoperability
Unlike many contemporary interoperability protocols, Polymer is not designed as a third-party bridge, but rather as a layer-2 Ethereum combination solution that serves a similar purpose to the ‘interoperability hub’ on Cosmos. It aims to provide IBC to Ethereum and connect to other layer 2 solutions.
IBC, unlike many other interoperability solutions today, is not a bridge application but a networking standard, Devain Pal Bansal, a product analyst at Polymer Labs, told Blockworks.
“The biggest benefit of introducing it to Ethereum, especially Ethereum rollups, is that it expands the possibilities of how a rollup establishes itself on Ethereum via the native bridge and extends it across rollups – without a third party accessing the data or the confirm its validity by simply using the shared source of truth for all rollups – Ethereum,” Bansal said.
Tommy O’Connell, senior product manager at Polymer, explained to Blockworks that applications can build their own bridges and control incoming and outgoing messages using a layer 1 layer of trust. This eliminates the need for an additional assumption of trust from a third party.
“This also allows us to focus on enabling chains to join Polymer’s ecosystem of chains with just a SINGLE connection to the hub, preventing Polymer from becoming a growth blocker,” O’Connell said.
This differs from Wormhole, for example, which relies on a supermajority of 13 out of 19 to confirm a message before it is produced or sent. It also differs from Axelar, which relies on validators for attestations.
However, it is important to note that Polymer’s minimum viable product (MVP) at testnet launch will be limited to the basics and optimism.
While this is the case, O’Connell notes that there are immediate plans to grow into other OP stack chains and soon after to other chains like those in the Cosmos ecosystem.
“The main benefit of OP stack rollups is that we built an IBC client for OP geth, allowing us to extend the capabilities of native L1<>L2 bridge over rollups. It is especially attractive because we can unlock other chains built on the OP stack with minimal expansion effort,” said O’Connell.