OpenSwap Troll Talks: Chapter #3 — What’s Wrong with Current Bridges?

We’ve recently made a teaser announcement to our community about the upcoming rollout of the 🔥 OpenSwap Troll Camp 🔥, a portal where OpenSwap users can stake $OSWAP and be rewarded with up to 40% OSWAP staking reward boost, attractive APR, group queue flash sale participation opportunities, and most importantly an exclusive Bridge Troll NFT for each user who successfully completes their Troll Camp staking.

Every Bridge Troll NFT will be unique and will represent a stake, and for community members who wish to become Bridge Troll operators and get lucratively rewarded as assets cross the OpenSwap bridge, they will need to have specific NFTs in their operator address to run a Bridge Troll node.

While we appreciate the OpenSwap community getting all hyped up about our Troll Camp, we’d want everyone to take a moment to first get to know about the cross-chain bridges in our current market, why the OpenSwap team deems them as just ‘moderately acceptable’, what Open Interchain Protocol is about, how it works differently from these conventional cross-chain bridges, and ultimately the role of Bridge Trolls in this mechanism, which ties back down to the Bridge Troll NFT rewards you guys will hope to earn from participating in the Troll Camp.

Remember to follow the OpenSwap Troll Talks series closely and pay attention to the next few publications where we will talk about the Open Interchain Protocol in-depth to help better prepare you guys for the upcoming Troll Camp staking opportunity.

Current bridges are just … bang average interim solutions 😕

The idea of cross-chain bridging and swapping has been a popular topic of discussion in the DeFi space since the Summer of DeFi in 2020, and since then, the entire industry has been shifted towards a multichain landscape. This makes the enablement of interchanging of assets across different chains increasingly important, to a point where it will soon become a fundamental necessity to the entire DeFi and blockchain universe.

At this moment in time, there are two conventional approaches being utilized and experimented with… the ‘Lock & Mint’ approach where synthetics are involved, and the ‘Cross-Chain Liquidity Pair Pool’ — a model still being experimented with and needs improvements.

The ‘Lock & Mint’ method is the easiest to implement. Currently, the centralized way of this method is done to where native tokens are given to a centralized custodian (e.g. Binance), who in turns mints a synthetic version of the token on a target blockchain. It is, of course, centralized… and deep down we all hate ourselves for using it. The decentralized version of ‘Lock & Mint’ would require the involvement of decentralized custodians, and these guys must be properly incentivized, otherwise… they may “misbehave”. The majority of the bridges in the current market (including those previously proposed or experimented with by Cosmos and PolkaDot) are of the ‘Lock & Mint’ variety, and they are all facing their own challenges in making it truly decentralized and their approach for key security.

And the other approach — the ‘Cross-Chain Liquidity Pool’ is a model that still needs experimentation and improvement. This method is different from the ‘Lock & Mint’ whereby liquidity providers would stake pairs consisting of a native token with an ecosystem token in the pool, and the platform routes swap leveraging the common ecosystem token to facilitate these cross-chain swaps. With this approach, swappers are able to receive native tokens on the target chain, unlike the ‘Lock & Mint’ model where users will just be getting 😐… synthetics.

While these conventional cross-chain methods are moderately acceptable in our current market (or should I say, the best out of a so-so scenario 🤷🏻), both of these methods do bring along critical pain points such as; slow speed, high costs, involving the use of synthetics, and can be a complex process…

Now, with OpenSwap’s Open Interchain Protocol, we will be introducing a solution that will offer more efficient inter-blockchain swapping of chain-native digital assets through the usage of single-asset vaults and decentralized mechanisms. This protocol will also incorporate OpenSwap innovations such as Liquidity Queues and Hybrid Smart Router, to form a transparent and super capital-efficient end-to-end interchain swapping solution, ultimately (hopefully) making current cross-chain bridging models obsolete.

Troll Thoughts 💭

Okay, now that you guys kinda understand why we shouldn’t be satisfied with the current cross-chain bridging models, I’d assume curiosity had been sparked, and community members should be somewhat interested in knowing how Open Interchain Protocol works?

In next week’s Troll Talks series, we will be diving deeper to discuss some of the core concepts of OpenSwap, the Open Interchain Protocol and the roles of Bridge Trolls in this whole mechanism. Be sure to fully understand this before deciding to enroll in the Troll Camp!

Learn More About OpenSwap

We encourage community members to partake in community discussions to help better shape OSWAP Tokenomics and help generate more utility ideas. Users may express their ideas to core team members through joining the OpenSwap telegram group: https://t.me/openswapdex

More information about OSWAP tokens will be shared with the community as the project continues to develop. In the meanwhile, please feel free to follow us on Twitter to receive the latest news and updates from OpenSwap.

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