Overview

Poly Network is a decentralized and trustless interoperability protocol for heterogenous blockchains. Interoperability between different classes of applications, assets and consensus mechanisms is realized via coordination with the Poly Relay Chain. 

Compared to existing cross-chain solutions, Poly Network is more inclusive and offers advanced security. Multiple blockchains can create a shared ecosystem where decentralized applications (DApps) communicate and secure liquidity, ensuring sustainability for end-users. Poly Network offers a systematic development framework for all developers — e.g., infrastructure, smart contracts, applications and others — to participate. 

Check dev-docs.Poly.network for more details.

Typical cross-chain asset interoperations with Poly Network include:

  • Lock-and-mint: Asset “A” on blockchain “X” is locked, and wrapped asset “A” is minted on blockchain “Y.”
  • Burn-and-mint: Asset “A” is burned on blockchain “X” and minted on blockchain “Y”, usually by the same authority.
  • Atomic swapping: Asset “A” on blockchain “X” is swapped with another asset “B” on blockchain “Y”.
  • Nonfungible token (NFT) support: NFT circulation between two blockchains is supported via the lock-and-mint and burn-and-mint approaches.

Open design

Poly Network implements an open design for crypto-assets and general infrastructure. Developers can include any asset — e.g., fungible or nonfungible, native cryptocurrencies or others — with Poly Network by specifying an asset’s smart contract and the token’s core messages, which are usually blockchain events signaled by the contract. 

Poly Network’s compatibility with diverse crypto assets means: 

  • High levels of responsiveness in a fast-changing ecosystem — i.e., an emerging asset’s user base and community can flexibly expand with Poly Network by interfacing with other blockchains 
  • Innovation friendliness: Developers can look at the existing space and brainstorm new ways to leverage assets without worrying if the custodian blockchain is the same

Poly Network’s infrastructure is fully open-sourced and based on: 

  • A relay chain serving as a decentralized and trustless anchor for interoperation on participating blockchains
  • Relayers that connect two heterogeneous blockchains
  • Interoperation smart contracts as endpoints for interacting with blockchain applications.

Any developer can implement new components by general design, making the Poly Network development community highly decentralized, with potential contributions from worldwide. 

Poly Network helps developers interface infrastructure to other applications with well-defined interoperation APIs. The applications can delegate interoperations services to Poly Network by calling the APIs instead of implementing from scratch. 

To summarize, Poly Network offers an open design that:

  • Supports a variety of crypto assets
  • Delivers an extensible infrastructure 
  • Encapsulates interoperations as service APIs.

Development support

Poly Network gives developers a systematic development framework and tool support. The framework supports infrastructural development and services. 

The platform’s use cases help explain their development: 

  • There are four steps to integrate a new blockchain, such as Polygon, with Poly Network’s ecosystem: 

  1. Register Polygon in Poly Network and assign an index. 

  2. Implement a block header verifier in Poly Network.

  3. Deploy an interoperation smart contract on Polygon. 

  4. Configure the relayer to monitor and forward interoperation messages from Polygon. 

  • Moving assets between blockchains is a common user request. With Poly Network, cross-chain bridges are made easy by deploying a pair of lock-and-mint or mint-and-burn smart contracts on both blockchains and linking the application contracts to Poly Network’s interoperation contract.

  • Blockchain-interopation development is easy and fast with Poly Network since it packages its implementations in a class of service APIs. To establish a blockchain application that interoperates with other blockchains, developers can integrate the application with Poly Network-provided APIs to generate call requests based on the APIs’ specifications.

The platform is releasing a developer toolchain to implement, design, validate, audit and upgrade Poly Network. Systematic development support is the core contributor to a prosperous developer community and the ecosystem itself.

Beyond cross-chain

Cross-chain capabilities have always been important with blockchain interoperability. Cross-chain is a common and popular use case for blockchain interoperations, but the concept means more in a multichain space. 

In addition to supporting crypto-asset circulation on heterogeneous blockchains, Poly Network defines standard smart contract interfaces for developers to implement general-purpose business logic rather than just token management. Poly Network benefits from blockchain composability by bridging to other applications via general-purpose interfaces while those applications stay unchanged. 

Universal interoperability also indicates atomicity for blockchain state transitions instead of mere asset transfers. Upcoming Poly Network upgrades will provide more development capabilities for universal interoperability and its potential applications.

Community & Ecosystem 

Poly Network is a global cross-chain protocol for implementing blockchain interoperability and building Web3 infrastructure. It has integrated almost 30 blockchains, including Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Fantom, BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Optimism, Heco, OKC, Neo, Ontology, Zilliqa, Harmony, Metis and more. 

Since its launch, the protocol has enabled cross-chain asset transfers of more than $16 billion.

Poly Network

With Poly Network, it’s simple to expand the market reach of an existing DApp or build a brand-new DApp. It provides underlying support for DApps, including Poly Bridge, Chainswap, Demex, Flamingo, MDEX, O3 Swap, Wing and ZilBridge. 

Poly Network

Poly Network is actively looking for DApp partners in building a Web3 interoperability ecosystem and provides a variety of technical support for partners. If one is interested in joining the Poly Network ecosystem, contact the platform via Discord.

Poly Network official links: