Courtesy of Map of Zones
The Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol provides a permissionless, trust-minimized and cost-efficient solution for cross-chain interoperability and offers better security & reliability unlike traditional and centralized bridges. It is fully open-source and none of the BS in-protocol rent extraction. It’s battle-tested, never been compromised and is considered one of the most widely-adopted interoperability standards in the industry.
IBC’s annual network growth is at 34% ****and has been facilitating transactions of over 35M+ on average during the same period. Today,there’s 115+ IBC-powered Cosmos SDK chains namely Cosmos Hub, Osmosis, Celestia, dYdX, Injective, Axelar, Stride, Noble and soon to join the recently announced Ondo Chain by Ondo Finance among others.
This year, the IBC core devs will be releasing IBC V2 called “Eureka”. According to the team, this upgrade simplifies IBC protocol’s implementation to other VMs by 10x aside from Cosmos SDK.
IBC by the numbers (cosmos ecosystem):
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Data Source: https://mapofzones.com
Now, here’s a look at the projects that are actively building and leveraging IBC beyond Cosmos using different design approach to interoperability:
Being built as an Ethereum L2 using the OP Stack, Polymer intends to become the “Interoperability Hub” by combining best of both Cosmos & Ethereum technologies. It extends IBC protocol through “virtual IBC” to all chains in its ecosystem by decoupling IBC’s transport-level execution from the application-level execution that takes place on connected rollups, hence, allows the latter to function independently, enhancing flexibility and scalability.
In addition to leveraging the Cosmos SDK for native IBC interoperability, Polymer utilizes EigenDA for its scalable data availability. Its interesting architecture positions itself as a potential go-to bridge in the Ethereum land.
Union’s flagship solution bridges Ethereum via IBC protocol enabling seamless liquidity and user interaction across its integrated ecosystems like Cosmos, Polygon, Berachain, Arbitrum, Scroll and Movement.