DARWINIA: COLORFUL NETWORK WITH STRONG TECHNOLOGY BACKGROUND

November 2020, Darwinia Network launches mainnet: one-way Ethereum — Darwinia bridge got its full functionality. While waiting for the next development stages, let’s see what we know about Darwinia.

Darwinia is one of best-known networks in the blockchain area as well its Evolution land game. Gamers and participants stayed with Evolution Land and Darwinia from the very beginning, through the “crypto winter” and reaping the benefits of their loyalty nowadays.

What is Darwinia? What is its uniqueness? What does its team see as future trends? Let’s look together.

BRIDGE, SWAP, CROSS-CHAIN, GAMES AND NFT

When we talk about Darwinia, we say, that it is a decentralized heterogeneous cross-chain bridge protocol developed using Substrate, focusing on decentralized cross-chain token swap, exchange, and market.

What they do is a cross-chain application hub, that provides application interoperability and asset cross-chain functions for blockchain applications in games and DeFfi sector. Darwinia aims to build an internet of tokens and is creating the infrastructure for it.

Developing bridge, Darwinias’s creators chose a non-custodial model. In contrast from a Custodian Model, where the whole process depends on intermediary trust which is centralized or semi-centralized, non-custodial model offers “”Less Trust, More Truth”. Short description of the transaction process is below.

When a user sends assets from Darwinia to another chain, the assets are locked on the original chain Darwinia. That is performed with a backing contract on Darwinia and no middleman needed, locking operation is under trustless control.

At the same time, the transaction is sent to the target heterogeneous chain. Darwinia Relay (a super light client, integrating MMR cryptography technology to make sure each confirmed block header aware of chain state history) deployed on the issuing chain verifies the transaction — it’s done with the cryptography technology, so again — no need for middlemen trust.

After that the issuing contract checks Darwinia Relay to confirm the transaction and issue the same amount of mapped asset.

Business direction is also focused on on-chain NFT services and cross-chain NFT markets, cross-chain token bridges for stablecoins, and cross-chain Token Dex protocol.

BITSHARES AS AN EXPERIENCE AND ITERING AS ACHIEVEMENT

Denny Wang and Alex Chien, two co-founders of Darwinia entered the crypto community in about 2012. They participated in Bitshares development, and Denny was a core developer of Bitshares 1.0. as well as participated in the entire crypto ecosystem and other projects, such as Ethereum, MakerDAO, NEO, etc.

In 2018 Itering Singapore company was founded and now this company is the developer of Darwinia open source software and it is the core development team of Darwinia. For now it developed such projects as the very popular Subscan blockchain browser, NFT Shifter services, Itering ID and DKMS — decentralized distributed key generation, signature, hosting, recovery solution.

DARWINIA AND POLKADOT

Polkadot and Substrate framework was chosen for building Darwinia because of its strong underlying support and security guarantees, extensive open source community and reliable partners.

Darwinia network will become Polkadot parachain. Meanwhile Darwinia Network can work in two modes: as parachain and solo chain. In a parachain mode the original validators and Staking mechanisms will be used to ensure local consensus within the Darwinia Network, which will help achieve faster block confirmation and higher TPS, while the cross-chain security of the parachains will be guaranteed by the validators of Polkadot Relay Chain.

In solo mode Darwinia Network can operate as an independent public-chain network and is responsible for its own consensus security.

EVOLUTION LAND AS GAMING, LEARNING AND TECHNOLOGY

Itering developed a blockchain game Evolution Land (https://www.evolution.land/), which was launched on Ethereum and Tron (two in-game continents), with a further plan of developing game application chain and Evolution Land plan to become a sub-chain of Darwinia.

Evolution land is a showcase of Darwinia cross-chain solution, the third continent will be deployed on Darwinia Network. On the one hand it’s a game, like SimCity on blockchain, where gamers can buy or sell lands, mine resources like gold, wood, water, fire and silicon materials produced on the land or synthesize the elements into props in smelters, as well as play in casinos, arenas or even in third-party Dapps. On the other hand it’s a perfect learning playground, where people that are far from blockchain technology can gain some experience: when deposit RINGs into Gringott bank and get KTON as a prize (staking) and as a voting rights, as soon as Evolution Land is DAO. And, of course, cross-chain transfers — when resources are transferred from one Continent to another.

One of the most-interesting things to the gamers — is NFT cross-chain transfers, that are already implemented in Evolution Land: it’s Сrypto Kitties that could be attached to apostles as pets (https://evolutionland.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018586654-Evolution-Land-open-the-Pet-System- ). Darwinia makes a special focus on NFT cross-chain transfers. And there is an explanation for this.

NFT AS A NEW BLOCKCHAIN FOCUS

NFT — is a non-fungible token, the asset that can’t be divisible, like say Ether or Bitcoin. NFT represents value as something holistic and unique, like a piece of art or collectible object. Most well-known cases for now are Crypto Kitties, which emerged in 2017.

Bree Yin, Darwinia’s CMO said in her speech at 2020 Global Blockchain Eco-Conference:

“ I also would like to highlight the potential integration between Defi and NFT. MakerDao is weighing accepting real-world assets as CryptoLoan. These assets are gonna be tokenized as NFT, such as supply chain invoices.

NFT market has been heating up in 2020, but clearly it’s heavily weighted to what’s happening on Ethereum. With surging Ethereum gas fees, we definitely need more options.”

INSTEAD OF CONCLUSION

For now DeFi is one of the hottest directions in blockchain, but due high gas fees it is almost closed for “ordinary”, not institutional users: this financial area needs more scalable public blockchains, need more cross-chain solutions — and this is what Darwinia performs: after the 4th stage of mainnet launch the following external blockchains will be supported: CRAB Network, TRON, BSC, EOS and others.

NFT market is the next hot point — and Darwinia is ready, providing asset tokenization service and upgrading single-chain NFT marketplace to multi-chain version with Itering NFT Shifter service. Supporting the cross-chain transfer of NFT, Darwinia is planning to launch its own cross-chain NFT market.

Darwinia bridge chain will serve as critical infrastructure to enhance cross-chain composability. Though custodial bridge solutions still work, the future internet of tokens need more interoperability, and will have to carry more significant value transfers, that means that decentralized bridges will finally become the most critical infrastructure.