Bridging the divide
“Bridging the divide” – a cartoon that illustrates the arrival of superchains, where multiple blockchain networks (e.g. Polygon, Solana) are bridged together.
At the moment, the network landscape is a series of city states each vying for the smartest entrepreneurs to come and build in their city (like renaissance Italy and the rivalries between the likes of Florence and Milan).
However, today’s consumers value ease of commerce and affordability over loyalty to a particular state, which was demonstrated by the collapse of the walled gardens of AOL in the first generation of the web.
We are starting to see the signs of the blockchain industry changing with the most ambitious new blockchain companies (distributed applications or dApps) starting on one chain and then extending to a second for scale.
Some blockchain companies are creating network technology that allows bridging at the protocol level (think creating a common operating system like Android), such as Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC), which is an open-source protocol that “allows heterogeneous chains to trustlessly communicate with each other to exchange data, messages, and tokens.”
Another example is the Optimism Superchain, which is based on the broadly adopted Ethereum protocol and allows for an unified network of chains built using the OP Stack.
While all these are improvements to help solve the challenge of scale, the industry also needs to nurture the Leonardo DaVinci’s of today to build compelling consumer products that bring broader consumer adoption to this technology.
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