Poly Network: Interoperability Makes Everything Simple

Original Title: "Poly Network: Interoperability Made Easy"

Original Source: Poly Network

Original Compilation: Poly Network Community

Overview

Poly Network is a decentralized and trustless interoperability protocol aimed at heterogeneous blockchain networks. Through the coordination of the Poly Network relay chain, interoperability can be achieved between different categories of on-chain applications, assets, and consensus models. Compared to existing cross-chain solutions, Poly Network is more inclusive and provides higher security guarantees. For on-chain users, Poly Network continuously offers interconnection among heterogeneous blockchains and establishes a shared ecosystem, enabling reliable and secure interactions and liquidity for decentralized applications. Based on these capabilities, Poly Network provides a systematic development framework for developers at all levels, including infrastructure, smart contracts, and applications, integrating the global developer community to co-build the Poly Network ecosystem. Please visit https://dev-docs.poly.network/ for more details.

Typical interoperability scenarios for cross-chain assets currently supported by Poly Network include:

• Lock & Mint, where asset A on blockchain X is locked while the mapped asset A is minted on blockchain Y.
• Burn & Mint, where asset A is destroyed on blockchain X and minted on blockchain Y, usually issued by the same authoritative entity.
• Atomic swaps, where asset A on blockchain X is exchanged for another asset B on blockchain Y.
• NFT support, facilitating the circulation of NFT assets between two blockchains through Lock & Mint and Burn & Mint methods.

Open Design

Poly Network implements an open design that is applicable not only to crypto assets but also to general infrastructure. Developers can simply specify the smart contract of a specific asset and the core messages that essentially describe asset-related activities (usually blockchain events emitted by the contract) to list any type of asset, including fungible/non-fungible assets and native cryptocurrencies, on Poly Network. In practice, the compatibility of Poly Network with various crypto assets means:

1. High responsiveness in a rapidly changing ecosystem, allowing user groups and communities of emerging assets to connect with other blockchains through Poly Network for flexible and rapid expansion;
2. Innovation friendliness, enabling developers to view the existing space and attempt to propose new ways to leverage asset composability without worrying about whether the underlying blockchains are the same.

The infrastructure of Poly Network is fully open-source and based on:

1. A relay chain, serving as a decentralized and trustless anchor for interoperability between blockchains,
2. Relayers connecting two heterogeneous blockchains, and
3. Nodes interacting between interoperable smart contracts and blockchain applications.

The design of the infrastructure is open to the entire ecosystem, allowing any developer to implement new components within the infrastructure. This feature makes the development community of Poly Network highly decentralized, with potential contributions from developers around the world. Additionally, Poly Network allows developers to connect their infrastructure with other applications through well-designed interoperability APIs. Specifically, applications from other ecosystems can delegate interoperability services to Poly Network by calling API interfaces, without having to start from scratch. In summary, Poly Network provides an open design:

• Supporting multiple crypto assets
• Offering scalable infrastructure
• Packaging interoperability as API services

Development Support

Poly Network provides developers with a systematic development framework and tool support (detailed in the open documentation center https://dev-docs.poly.network/). This framework supports the development of Poly Network infrastructure and its supported services. We use the following use cases to illustrate the development experience using Poly Network.

• Integrating new blockchains. To integrate a new blockchain into the Poly Network ecosystem, taking Polygon as an example, developers need about 4 steps to achieve:

1. Register Polygon in Poly Network and assign it an index;
2. Implement block header verification for Polygon in Poly Network;
3. Deploy interoperable smart contracts on Polygon, and
4. Configure relayers to monitor and forward interoperability messages from Polygon.

• Building cross-chain bridges. Transferring assets from one blockchain to another is a common need among users. By deploying a pair of lock/mint or mint/burn smart contracts on two blockchains and linking the application contract to Poly Network's interoperability contract, cross-chain bridges based on Poly Network can be easily developed.
• Interoperability as a service. Developing any form of blockchain interoperability using Poly Network is very convenient and quick, as it packages the implementation of interoperability support into a class of service APIs. To establish applications that interoperate with other blockchains on the blockchain, developers can integrate their applications with the APIs provided by Poly Network and generate call requests based on the specifications of these APIs.

Additionally, Poly Network plans to provide developers with a development toolchain that covers the entire development lifecycle, including design, validation, auditing, and upgrades, beyond just coding support. We believe that systematic development support is crucial for the prosperity of the developer community and the entire ecosystem.

Beyond Cross-Chain

Cross-chain capabilities have always been at the center of discussions on blockchain interoperability. However, we believe that while cross-chain is a common and popular use case for blockchain interoperability, the concept of interoperability extends far beyond its meaning in a multi-chain space. In addition to supporting the circulation of crypto assets across heterogeneous blockchains, Poly Network also defines standard smart contract interfaces for developers to implement general business logic, rather than just simple token management. This flexibility allows Poly Network to bridge itself to other applications through a universal interface, which remain unchanged, further benefiting from the composability of blockchains. The idea of universal interoperability also indicates the atomicity of blockchain state transitions, rather than merely asset transfers. The upcoming Poly Network upgrade will focus on providing more development capabilities for achieving universal interoperability and its potential applications.

Community and Ecosystem

Poly Network is a global cross-chain protocol for achieving blockchain interoperability and building Web3.0 infrastructure. Poly Network has integrated approximately 30 blockchains, including Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Fantom, BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Optimism, HECO, OKC, Neo, Ontology, Zilliqa, Harmony, Metis, and more. Since its launch, the total amount of cross-chain assets has exceeded $16 billion.

With the help of Poly Network, whether you want to expand the market reach of an existing dApp or build a brand new dApp, implementation will become simple. So far, Poly Network has provided underlying support for dApps including Poly Bridge, Chainswap, Demex, Flamingo, MDEX, O3 Swap, Wing, and ZilBridge.

Poly Network is actively seeking dApp partners to co-build the Web3.0 interoperability ecosystem with us. Poly Network offers various technical support to global partners, as detailed at https://dev-docs.poly.network/. If you are interested in joining the Poly Network ecosystem, please contact us via Discord.

Here are the official links for Poly Network:

• Website: https://www.poly.network/#/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/PolyNetwork2