Today, we are really excited to announce our recent development — Omnichain NFT Gateway. Our next cross-chain solution enables transferring any NFT between chains! All of that without burning an original NFT and losing its on-chain history and utility.
Bridges are flawed 🌉
Our position on the existing NFT bridges is radical. You can learn more about it in the linked article.
Current bridges have their fundamentals cons:
- Original NFT is being burned on the source blockchain during bridging.
- The copy on the destination chain “pretends” to be the original while it’s not.
- Copy doesn’t contain the original’s on-chain history (transactions, external contracts’ references, utilities). And in Web3, that’s everything.
- Most external contracts don’t know about a copy's existence, and the burned original is unrecoverable. Misunderstanding can lead to a huge value loss (let’s say burning your most valuable NFT).
Solution — Omnichain NFT Gateway 🪄
Our solution, from a technical standpoint, is also an NFT bridge, but one that fixes the above-mentioned problems.
- Original NFT is not burned but instead locked in the Gateway contract, and recoverable for the owner in exchange for the copy.
- We call it like it is, a copy on the destination chain is just a wrapped version of the original NFT. It has the same properties and metadata as the original but it doesn’t have its on-chain history and references.
- Utility is never lost, an owner can always return to his/her original NFT and burn the copy.
- Gateway is not limited to certain NFTs (e.g. created via our Launchpad). It supports any ERC-721 contract with the intent to support additional standards, like ERC-1155, in the nearest future.
Any NFT is Omnichainable ⚛️
As stated above, the Omnichain NFT Gateway is fully compatible with all existing ERC-721 NFTs! Any digital collectible can now be safely wrapped and transferred between chains with guaranteed recoverability of the original. Support for more NFT standards, like ERC-1155, will be added soon.
The following picture presents the transfer of a single NFT from the BNB Chain (original) to the Avalanche (copy), and back to the BNB Chain with the original NFT being recovered by the owner 👇
Additional picture displaying the recoverability of the original. NFT with token ID no. 1 is firstly locked and transferred (copied) and later it comes back to the owner without losing its reference to the contract (collection) and the rest of its on-chain history. As you can also see, that NFT is 77 days old and it is still compatible with the Gateway 😊
Wen?
Soon. As you can see our implementation is already working as intended and we’ll deploy it into the current Testnet in the nearest future. However, we are also very aware that cross-chain operations aren’t something to be careless and we don’t want to toy with our users' property without making sure everything is safe and well-tested. With the Launchpad Mainnet being our current priority, we plan to deploy Gateway a little bit after that with no exact ETA (depends on the Testnet behavior). The initially supported blockchains will be Ethereum, Polygon, Moonbeam, BNB Chain, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Fantom.
