Azuro Mainnet Launch: Why We Chose Gnosis Chain
We recently announced that the first chain to launch the Azuro protocol will be Gnosis Chain and this week have switched over our testnet in preparation for launch. As Azuro mainnet draws ever nearer we thought we would take a deep dive into Gnosis Chain, explain our reasons behind the choice, and how it will be beneficial for decentralized betting.
xDai Chain
Gnosis Chain started its life in 2018 as xDai Chain, an early Ethereum scaling solution, which quickly became popular amongst developers looking to deploy EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) blockchains due to its high compatibility with the Ethereum network, and also with the advantage of having cheap and quick transactions. xDai Chain was designed with a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism to solve Ethereum’s congestion and high gas fees. Unfortunately, xDai Chain didn’t manage to become a long-term option with a lot of projects often using it as a testing ground before deploying on other chains.
The Merge
In November 2021 Martin Köppelmann proposed in a Gnosis improvement proposal — GIP 16, that xDai Chain and Gnosis should merge, stating that:
“The Gnosis and the xDAI community should merge their tokens and together develop the xDAI Blockchain under the name “Gnosis Chain” with an ambitious technical roadmap”
One of the main focal points for the merge was to remove the perception of xDai Chain being a staging area and to become the long-term migration for projects. Gnosis has already laid out a clear roadmap on this with the main priorities being, to have tight Ethereum compatibility with migration to Ethereum 2 security model, extremely inexpensive using advances in rollup technologies, to be as decentralized as possible, and as trust minimized as possible.
Both communities responded well to the merge overall, and as Gnosis is an extremely well-respected team with years of experience in the industry, they were the perfect fit to improve xDai Chain’s ecosystem by providing marketing, business development, and funding.
Gnosis Chain
Now fully merged and the name changed to Gnosis Chain, there is an exciting future ahead for the team with plenty of new project migrations and integrations joining the ecosystem. As Gnosis Chain is an Ethereum sister chain, this means any smart contract of dApp deployed on Ethereum can also be deployed on Gnosis Chain with minimal changes. This allows for many areas of web3 to be built on Gnosis Chain including NFTs, DeFi, and DAOs. 3rd party projects and dApps deployed on Gnosis Chain currently include 1inch Exchange, SushiSwap, Daohaus, RaidGuild, Curve, DarkForest, and many more. You can find a full list of integrations here.
Why We Chose Gnosis Chain
Gnosis has an incredible track record building infrastructure for Ethereum with amazing projects such as Gnosis Safe and CoWSwap and also has a history in decentralized prediction markets. Now with them teaming up with xDai to create Gnosis Chain, it seemed like a great choice for our first mainnet launch. One of the most important reasons is the incredible 5-second block speed and fees at a fraction of those on Ethereum, with 500 transactions costing approximately $0.1.
We have a great connection with the team both personally and professionally which lead to Gnosis becoming one of the lead investors in our seed round cementing their belief in the protocol. As well as tech support both pre and post mainnet launch Gnosis has generously agreed to support the protocol by providing $2.3m for the initial setup of liquidity pools on the chain and are supplying 200 GNO tokens as rewards for early Azuro users. We have an exciting future ahead working with Gnosis Chain and having them as members of our DAO. We will also most certainly be taking full advantage of their years of experience across all corners of the industry.
We are currently running on Gnosis Chain Testnet — Sokol in preparation for the mainnet launch at the end of April. For a full guide on how to get started on Sokol and start testing the protocol, refer to our Gnosis Chain setup guide below.
To stay up to date on our progress, follow azuro on these channels:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/azuroprotocol
Discord: https://discord.gg/azuro
Telegram: https://t.me/azuroprotocol
Website:https://azuro.org/
