Introducing Spacefold
Connext’s Submission to the Reddit Scalability Challenge
TL;DR
Channels run on roll-ups, plasma, and sidechains today! They further reduce the complexity of these solutions, and most importantly fix the problems with on/offboarding from L2!
This is a milestone achievement, and marks a huge step forward for interoperable scalability standards. We also built a demo of this for the Reddit challenge: https://spacefold.io.
You can find our original submission to Reddit here.
Open source code is available here.
Out of the box, you can “fold” to Optimism, Matic, xDai with support for SKALE and Arbitrum coming very soon.
Instant L2 communication with Connext
Today, we’re excited to introduce Spacefold, our submission to the Reddit Scalability Challenge. Spacefold is a UI on top of a Connext node that demonstrates the power of using State Channels for instant cross-chain communication.
Spacefold supports folding into the following L2 chains:
But can we can also support any other chain that is EVM-compatible!
Hol’ up, what does this have to do with Reddit?
Connext is specifically designed to be a programmable, point-to-point micropayment network (and we’re very good at it!).
The consequence of this is that we’re not suitable for some of the generalized-compute activities that Reddit wants to scale, particularly minting and burning. Because of the way that state channels work, balances within Connext are necessarily private to each user. We go into more detail on this here.
Rather than building a totally custom implementation for this challenge, we decided to instead collaborate with existing L2 chains instead to work towards what we think is the most optimal outcome for a scalable Ethereum for all:
An internet of L2 chains/shards using state channels as a shared scalable protocol to communicate value across.
Using Connext, users never need to know what chain/shard they’re on. They can transfer funds and even atomically call contracts across chains entirely seamlessly.
Although L2 solutions are typically pitted together in head to head competition, they are actually composable similar to DeFi money legos. And, when they are stacked on top of each other, you can create much more powerful ecosystems that are greater than the sum of their parts.
Spacefold is our first experiment into the new and amazing space of L2 composability.
How do I use the demo?
We made a short video walkthrough here that shows how you can use Spacefold:
Where can I find more info?
The best place is the Spacefold repository readme. There, we cover more in-depth topics such as:
- Compatibility with L2 chains
- How it actually works
- Demo implementation details
- Trust assumptions
Have any other questions?
If you have any questions, get in touch with us by:
And lastly, please share this with your friends in the ecosystem if you find it interesting.
Thanks for your support,
Team Connext
