Bod’s entry to the @Neutron_org community program launch

Introduction: The 90’s kid with a knack for inventions.

The year is 1998. The revolution of modern animation hit you for the first time. Jimmy Neutron, the 11-year-old kid with an IQ of 210 points. With only an elementary education, he stunned the world as an aerospace engineer, physicist, astronaut, biochemist, and computer programmer.

During his three glorious years on television, he created Goddard, before Boston Dynamics did, the Strato rocket ship, before Space X did, the neutronic air gum, the cloning machine, smart pants, and an omni-tasting piece of candy.

Skip forward ~20 years.

Jimmy is no longer a role model for kids, no longer the centrepiece for animation, and no longer an inspiration for the machinery of the future. However, that didn’t stop him from continuing his streak of revolutionary inventions. It took the rise of blockchains, decentralization, and modularity to inspire Jimmy for his latest and greatest piece of work. In 2022, he created: The Neutron chain.

Neutron: The brainblast of interoperability

Having found the conviction to contribute to the digitalized economy, he went out on a path of exploration. He explored Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Cosmos. The latter one seemed full of like-minded thinkers but had its fair share of criticism. The Cosmos SDK, leading platform on the Cosmos Hub, lacked support for self-executing pieces, known as smart contracts. This caused fragmentation and the lack of possibilities to store every piece of software tokens into a single place. Liquidity was being scattered around this digital universe, hence lacking the deep liquidity needed to support financial, decentralized software.

With the Neutron chain, the effort to translate development into a developer- and consumer-friendly ecosystem, suddenly became possible. To bring distribution into the ecosystem, Jimmy unveiled the Integrated applications* approach, a powerful mechanism to build DeFi applications with the power of appchains* and the scalability of smart contracts. From the official launch and now, Cosmos chains have been migrating from the HUB to Neutron.

*Appchains
An application-specific blockchain. Instead of having one platform on which multiple applications are deployed, appchains make it possible to have a single platform for a single application, designed and optimized for the application that it powers. This single application is connected throughout the entire blockchain space. It grants access to functionalities that exist outside of its own virtual machine.

This supplies the space with integrated, but sovereign appchains. It gets crosschain security guarantees and creates a cohesive experience

*Integrated applications
Combines powerful enshrined features with the development speed and synchronous composability of smart-contracts, enhancing efficiency, security, and reach.

Since, with the power of appchains, it has access to components outside of its own virtual machine, you still gain: begin and end block automation, mempools, transaction fee mechanisms, consensus votes, interchain transactions, and queries.

An example: To effectively use the power of Celestia*, you need to bridge from Celestia into the chain of your choice. Then, you’ll have to bridge from that chain, into the specific rollup.
The Neutron chain serves as a second base, turning the experience into a simple one click-flow.

Celestia
A modular data availability network that makes it easy for anyone to securely launch their own blockchain.

With the combined power of appchains and integrated applications, blockchain apps can stay minimized and lightweight, while accessing the power and customizability of a mature appchain. It provides both RPC — remote procedure calls (the ability to connect to a different blockchain) remotely and redundant relayers*, straight out of the box.

Redundancy of relayers makes sure that if communication between a blockchain fails, Neutron steps in to communicate regardless.

The future of Neutron: Turning Cosmos into a consumer chain

So, we have integrated applications, appchains, lightweight apps and redundancy. This together, leads to the provision of gasless onboarding to new users and the deployment and management of capital, and integrations across all chains. Maximizing these network effects, DeFi protocols can establish a competitive edge that other blockchain providers lack.

An example is Lido. Rolling out on Neutron will make them more attractive and competitive since they can guarantee higher performance and a broader reach. With Neutron, it will need less overhead development, it will gain improved mechanism design, lower risk, and an enhancement of scalability.

With ‘https://bridge.neutron.org/bridge’, the first step is set. This wstETH bridge is not just an assets bridge; it is a strategic infrastructure piece designed to advance both the Neutron and Ethereum ecosystem.

Other players in the Neutron space are:
Apollo: A liquid stake yield provider.
Amulet finance: A lending platform with self-repaying loans.
EclipseFI: A hub for interchain token launches.
Contributors like @deploydon, use the permissionless nature of Neutron to create bankrupt.zone and a, to be officially announced, Cosmos version of pump.fun.

By working closely with protocols like Celestia, Hyperlane, and Mitosis, Neutron adds its share to the omnichain future by contributing to permissionless bridging. Examples that are currently live are Nautilusbridge.com and Usenexus.org.

Conclusion

As with every genius, Jimmy is working on transcending the boundaries of conventional thought, potentially revolutionizing the landscape of blockchain innovation. With the finance of crypto being heavily fragmented, protocols lack composability, design space, and optimization to adhere exactly to the requirements they need.

This leaves programmers to choose a specific, generic blockchain, limiting the possibilities of collaboration with ecosystems outside of the virtual machine they ended up choosing.

With Neutron and its system of integrated applications and appchains, they bridge the gap between blockchain ecosystems, introducing a new era of interoperability and collaboration. This will serve as a cornerstone of a unified, interconnected blockchain ecosystem, echoing the ingenuity and vision of its namesake, Neutron.