ZetaChain Whitepaper and Devnet Launch

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Today we are excited to announce the successful deployment of our devnet and the close of an initial seed funding round which includes investments from early Coinbase and Binance employees including Dan Romero, Sam Rosenblum, and John Yi, as well major contributors to some of the industry’s most widely adopted protocols and well known funds, including Polygon’s JD Kanani and HwiSang Kim former CIO of Hashed; advisors on the project include Nathalie McGrath, who, as Coinbase’s first Head of People, scaled the industry leading exchange from a team of just 10 to over 800 employees, and Juan Suarez, who served as in-house counsel for Coinbase from 2013 until 2022. Ramping up to a mainnet launch later this year, ZetaChain’s ‘omnichain’ approach will mean that existing smart contracts and dApps will only require a few additional lines of code in order to function as ‘omnichain-dApps’, or “odApps”, capable of interacting with all blockchains at a native level — all while avoiding the need to wrap or bridge any assets.

Web3 has an interoperability problem. Currently, cross-chain solutions like bridges are reliant on token wrapping and are risky and arduous due to their interdependent nature, and each blockchain environment or cross-chain interaction requires an understanding of specific, bespoke solutions, user interfaces, or relevant cross-chain compatible pairs. Key industry thought leaders, including Vitalik Buterin, have spoken out against bridges that ‘wrap’ assets and the risks presented by the inherently fragmented ‘cross-chain’ approaches in use today and the exploit on blockchain bridge Wormhole, where hackers stole $320 million, heightened awareness of the ongoing complications faced by the increasingly segmented blockchain industry.

“With ZetaChain, no wrapped assets are needed to transfer value cross-chain and no bridges are needed for every pair of blockchains. After talking to exchanges dealing with multichain integrations at a sizable scale, and trialing centralized and decentralized cross-chain strategies, it became clear that a novel omnichain approach was needed to outset the risks of asset fragmentation, reduce the risks of 51% attacks and improve the developer experience overall”, stated our lead contributor, who has done foundational work on Brave Browser and the Basic Attention Token ($BAT), as well as major contributions to Coinbase’s wallet and consumer app.

ZetaChain will transition from Proof-of-Authority consensus to Proof-of-Stake model over time; the protocol is based on the Cosmos SDK and utilizes the Tendermint Consensus mechanism. ZetaChain is especially focused on providing the best possible developer experience and we aim to make building on the ZetaChain protocol a streamlined and familiar experience for developers already familiar with building on other platforms.

ZetaChain’s omnichain smart contract blockchain will prove to be beneficial for a number of reasons. Below are a few key use value propositions:

• Trust-minimized cross-chain asset and data transfer
• Externally-managed smart contract capabilities for chains like Bitcoin & Dogecoin
• No wrapping of assets or bridges are needed to transfer values cross-chain
• Multichain NFTs, DAOs, governance, identity, etc.
• Seamless multichain DeFi; lending, staking, yield farming, etc.
• DApp developers can add multichain functionality by simply implementing a few functions into their existing smart contracts, enabling omnichain-dApps, or odApps

The recently released full whitepaper is available here. If you’re an eager developer who’s interested in working towards an omnichain future with ZetaChain, please contact us here.

About ZetaChain

ZetaChain is the foundational layer to a truly multichain future; the blockchain’s novel approach creates a truly fluid crypto-ecosystem that will enable more users, developers, and traders than ever to onboard, use, and take advantage of the benefits of crypto. ZetaChain’s blockchain enables multichain functionality without using bridges or wrapped tokens and enables the easy deployment of omnichain-dApps, or odApps, that can manage and connect data and value across all smart contract platforms as well as non-smart contract platforms like Bitcoin and Dogecoin.

Follow ZetaChain on Twitter @zetablockchain and join the conversation on Discord