Since Bitcoin’s inception in 2009 and the subsequent surge of innovation, the web3 industry has encountered numerous challenges. In addition to managing regulatory issues, enhancing user experience, and eliminating bad actors, blockchain engineers continue to grapple with two primary obstacles: scalability and interoperability.
Many Layer 2 solutions aim to scale Layer 1 networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum by increasing throughput and lowering transaction fees. Meanwhile, protocols like Union are working to achieve interoperability at scale, addressing both key challenges simultaneously.
The Necessity of Blockchain Interoperability
Regardless of your opinion on the WEF, its 2020 whitepaper on blockchain interoperability accurately highlighted a critical concern: “Organizations do not want to find themselves on a blockchain platform that may limit their options for external collaboration in the future.”
To elaborate, imagine if having a Gmail account meant you couldn’t send messages to a Yahoo account. The rapid development of the internet was largely due to its early emphasis on interoperability, and blockchains need to adopt the same principle.
A key player in the interoperability space is Cosmos, whose flagship Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol has allowed numerous sovereign chains to connect, transact, exchange, swap tokens, and perform other actions without compromising their independence. According to Map of Zones, 91 zones are now connected via IBC, facilitating over $2.1 billion in transactions across more than 8.7 million transactions in the last 30 days.
IBC isn’t limited to Cosmos chains. This trustless interoperability protocol has expanded to include EVM-compatible chains such as Ethereum, Polygon, and Avalanche. However, most bridging solutions to date have been offered by centralized providers, requiring users to trust the bridging protocol.
Union, developed and supported by Composable Finance, Consensys, Tokensoft, and Polygon Labs, offers a permissionless bridging protocol that connects modular blockchains and rollups trustlessly, without relying on trusted third parties, oracles, multi-signatures, or MPC, using advanced zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography.
Already connecting several ecosystems, Union recently announced a partnership with L2 developer Polygon Labs. This partnership will leverage Polygon’s AggLayer to facilitate message passing and asset transfers between the Polygon ecosystem and IBC-enabled chains, effectively bridging two of the largest blockchain ecosystems: Polygon and Cosmos.
Seamlessly Bridging Polygon, Cosmos, and Beyond Without Permission
Union founder and prior CTO at Composable Finance Karel Kubat told CryptoSlate, “It’s not just a Cosmos to Polygon bridge but anything that’s IBC-enabled, which includes Scroll, and soon Arbitrum, Berrachain, Movement Labs, M2… They can build and connect into the Agglayer using Union,” permissionlessly tapping into the liquidity of one of the largest blockchain Layer 1s, Ethereum.
“Right now it’s very interesting because we have big L1 ecosystems that really only have permissioned centralized bridges or something in between. You need to go to the bridge provider to get support for a small ecosystem. What Union does, is if you’re building a new Cosmos chain or a new rollup that’s IBC enabled, you don’t need to go to a centralized provider to get support. You just open the connection to Ethereum and you’re done… So we’re going quite quickly from a world with only 200 to 300 ecosystems to a world with thousands and thousands.”
This type of seamless interoperability isn’t possible with centralized solutions because the “wait queue” is too long. Every chain wanting to connect needs to request the bridging protocol’s permission.
With Union, chains can permissionlessly open a channel with Ethereum, enabling a seamlessly interconnected future… of potentially millions of chains. Karel gives the example of dYdX, one of the largest decentralized exchanges that began as a smart contract on Ethereum and moved ecosystems to become a sovereign Cosmos app chain.
“We all went into crypto for sovereignty,” he says. “Any successful smart contract is contemplating going to their own L2 or app chain.” This means the total addressable market for Union is potentially vast. “It isn’t anyone that wants to build a blockchain. It’s any existing app on Ethereum and Solana that could benefit from making this move.”
Union’s IBC to Polygon bridge should be completed by the end of this year and you can keep up with the latest developments by following Union on X.