Why is it difficult for blockchain to be as popular as the internet since its inception? One of the biggest obstacles is that the respective proprietary ecosystems of Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchains cannot easily share data or exchange value with each other.

Multichains will coexist in the future

Neo Polaris Launchpad’s online panel on March 30 was dedicated to discussing the development trend of public chains and cross-chains. He Yifan, executive director of Blockchain Service Network Development Alliance and CEO of Red Date Tech, Neo Global Development head of growth John Wang and Poly Network core developer Tan Yuan expressed their views on the future development of public chains and cross-chains.

Each chain is like a website today and will co-exist in the future, whether it is a public chain or an alliance chain. In terms of technical logic, all flowers will bloom together in the blockchain sector.

Wang said, “In essence, I think, in the future, even for a long time, there should be multichains coexisting. There may be a Pareto principle — the leading blockchains are used frequently, such as Ethereum, to be a technical standard widely used."

It’s the same for Neo, according to John: It’s important to have its own uniqueness while also embracing as much diversity on-chain as possible.

In terms of the overall development trend, Ethereum scaling solutions and all other aspects are actually still in the process of technical development. In addition, many new applications for decentralized finance, nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and others will lead to a more prosperous application ecosystem than before on the whole blockchain.

However, Ethereum itself is affected by fees and network congestion. This is actually a better opportunity for some other public chains.

In the opinion of Yuan, new public chains such as Solana, Avalanche and Fantom are actually developing relatively well. The overall demand for application development has to be supported by more public chains.

Cross-chain technology is necessary

The number of blockchains is proliferating, and most of these blockchain networks operate on separate ecosystems. As more and more people continue to focus on and use blockchains, connecting these different blockchains is becoming a necessity.

Cross-chain technology is an emerging technology that aims to enable the transfer of value and information between different blockchain networks. As a result, cross-chain technology is also increasingly becoming a hot topic of discussion.

Cross-chain technology is seen as the ultimate solution to enhance interoperability between blockchains. So, what is the core and principle behind cross-chain? 

In this regard, Yifan said: “How do websites with different communication standards interoperate with each other? In fact, there is something similar to a cross-chain between them, so eventually, it is why this thing disappears, because the underlying communication standards are unified. So, the core of cross-chain is to unify the underlying standards in the future, which is the perfect cross-chain.”

Essentially, cross-chain compatibility allows different blockchains to communicate with each other without the help of an intermediary. This means that blockchains that share similar networks will be able to transfer value between each other.

Cross-chain plays a key role in the development of any blockchain ecosystem. At present, there are many cross-chain solutions, but they are not decentralized enough, and many people are implementing cross-chain resource interaction through some centralized means, thus rarely adopted by developers.

Poly Network has taken a different approach by designing a unique heterogeneous chain and cross-chain bridge technology that will control the cross-chain by deploying smart contracts on the native chain. 

Yuan said, “Poly Network currently adopts a more decentralized and heterogeneous approach to open up asset swap and information flow between different chains.”

There is no doubt that cross-chain technology will receive more and more attention from users and developers, and more and more blockchain applications will increase their efforts to explore the possibility of cross-chain deployment, said Yifen.

NFTs are moving toward cross-chain

NFTs are performing extremely well in 2022, becoming one of the most dominant blockchain trends today. NFTs have reached almost every aspect of daily life, and one can expect to see more examples of NFT adoption in 2022.

In terms of application landing, NFTs are mainly focused on simple use cases such as text or avatars. The current application landing of NFTs may not be so rich, but deeper ones are bound to emerge in the future.

Most NFT transactions happen on the Ethereum blockchain. However, Ethereum is currently slow and costly, which is burdensome for most users, and it is unsustainable, which is why many NFT players are eager to turn to other blockchain networks such as Polygon, Solana, Flow and more.

NFTs are more and more clearly assetized, just like people’s real-world assetized houses. After assetization, these NFT assets will naturally flow across chains, and then NFT will undoubtedly move toward cross-chains.

According to John, it is a trend to transfer NFTs that have been assetized. He said, “How to ensure the synchronization of the state of NFTs on-chain and on other chains, and how to ensure compliance, is actually a problem that public chains need to explore in the future.”