Blocknet scales development effort, pursues Ethereum and Avalanche interoperability

Published in

Blocknet

3 min readApr 23, 2021

22 April 2021, Boston — the Blocknet accelerates its efforts on two fronts, enabling the most decentralized exchange to trade Ethereum tokens with over 140 different blockchains, and making Avalanche and Ethereum chain data available via decentralized API, empowering dapp developers to easily orchestrate contracts and protocols on different blockchains.

Delivering a decentralized internet

The potential for blockchain technology to disrupt the world’s major digital monopolies is tremendous. However, among blockchain interoperability projects, only the Blocknet is decentralized at the interchain level itself. Other approaches place either a single blockchain’s consensus, or the agreement of a small group of individuals, at its centre, which results in a hub-and-spoke architecture essentially similar to the internet’s current distribution of control. In contrast, the Blocknet relies on the finality reached by interoperating blockchains themselves, and enables users to prove chain state without hosting the chain locally. Thus, instead of creating hubs (centres of control) and spokes, it offers an open, chain-agnostic protocol that does not centralize control.

With the growth of its development team, the Blocknet is accelerating progress toward the decentralization of the internet with an upcoming product suite of dApps, libraries for interchain trading, and Hydra enhancements such as GraphQL support, history per address, and UTXO per address, provable locally and without placing a burden of trust upon users.

New hires

In February, the Blocknet announced its new methodology and readiness to hire. Since then, it has welcomed several newcomers to the project, and benefits additionally from the return of the original developer of XBridge — the decentralized trading engine at the heart of Block DX. This means that, alongside various part-time or volunteer contributors, the contingent of full-time developers has grown from two in February to six in April. Complementing our longtime frontend and lead/backend pair are two new senior developers: the original XBridge developer and another with extensive experience coding secure networks. Their current focus is the refactoring of XBridge, with the ultimate goal of supporting web-based trading and an optimal user experience. Meanwhile, the Avalanche indexer project benefits from two further developers with Solidity, Python, C++, Java, JavaScript, and other relevant experience.

Strategic targets

With these new capabilities, the Blocknet is empowered to accelerate its progress and to improve code quality, delivering more quickly upon its unique vision for a truly open interchain ecosystem. Strategically important products and tools currently include:

Completing ETH/ERC20 support for Block DX
Decentralized GraphQL indexer for Avalanche and Ethereum chain data
Support for partial orders for Block DX (in final rounds of testing)
The refactoring of XBridge to run on top of XRouter
The maturation of XRouter libraries, for use in dapps, browser extensions, etc.

The vision

The Blocknet anticipates interchain dapps to be a pivotal part of the decentralized internet. Instead of dapp developers having to choose a blockchain and also attempt the difficult task of coding smart contracts or blockchain protocols, dapp development is poised to become as easy as traditional app development. Instead of having to build every component, traditional developers harness the API ecosystem to quickly and simply integrate features. Similarly, the Blocknet empowers developers to harness the contracts and protocols of effectively every blockchain in existence without having to host any chain locally, and without having to trust third parties’ testimony in the process.

To this end, the following realities are within reach this quarter:

The aforementioned Avalanche indexer
XRouter-powered interchain dapps leveraging Ethereum and Avalanche contracts and protocols
The frictionless orchestration of protocols and contracts
Client-side XRouter proofs for Go applications

About the Blocknet

The Blocknet is a decentralized network that connects blockchains, similar to how the internet connects computers. Whether it’s through cross-chain dApps or using the protocol as a 2nd layer to index blockchains, the Blocknet provides developers with the capability to create the applications of tomorrow.