I stumbled upon this website called https://www.submarinecablemap.com/. It shows 1.2 Million kilometers of fiber optic cable that is currently installed and planned to be installed to connect humanity to the internet. It's quite impressive!
The work of laying down massive amounts of fiber optic cable began in the 1980's and it's a fascinating industry
With these cables in place, it took around 30 years for the internet to get to the point where we can order chicken al pastor burritos from Chipotle from our mobile phone and have it delivered to our doorstep.
The future is now my friends.
Blockchain technology
Since the inception of Bitcoin, the first blockchain protocol, we've seen hundred and now thousands of different blockchains emerge. Some of them focusing on privacy, some focusing on speed, some on providing tooling for developers.
We've seen Ethereum give birth to the smart contract, we've seen Coinbase launch their L2, Base, we've seen Radix, and we've seen the revolutionary Hive Blockchain that allows users to get rewarded for creating content that the community finds valuable.
The problem, however, is that a lot of these segregated blockchains don't communicate with each other and even have their cultish maximalist tribes and developers having to double and triple their efforts in order to deploy smart contracts on multiple chains.
For users, it means we have to have multiple wallets, browser extensions, different dapps and of course, it also means having to fork over your government issued photo id and phone number to an exchange company that will charge you a fee and could potentially confiscate your assets.
Blockchain interoperability is allowing isolated blockchain networks to exchange data.
If you've kept up with the development happening with the INLEO team, you've probably seen that the LEO token is now available on Arbitrum blockchain. We can now exchange value from Layer 1 blockchains like bitcoin into HIVE using INLEO DEX.
Websites like https://swap.mayan.finance/ harness the power of USDCs CCTP (cross-chain transfer protocol) to exchange between blockchains such as Ethereum, BSC, Avalanche, Solana and Arbitrum.
Wormhole and Axelar are working on inter-blockchain communication protocols that as interpreters between blockchains. They are able to "translate" individual blockchain languages so that they can communicate.
Just like the submarine fiber optic cable that allows different continents to communicate with each other, these protocols are are laying down the foundation for more and more blockchains to work together.
The benefits of connecting multiple blockchains are huge.
Increased functionality
If you've seen any of my #spendhbd videos, you'll notice that I'm using Hive Keychain on my mobile phone to pay a Lightning invoice that eventually the merchant could convert to on-chain Bitcoin and send it to a cold wallet.
Uniswap, which was originally deployed on the Ethereum network uses Wormhole's protocol for governance. It's used to decide what blockchains get incorporated into Uniswap and what the fee structure will look like.
More liquidity
Just like you need plenty of water to comfortably swim, we need plenty of cryptocurrency exchanging hands to be able to make large transactions without effort and also without affecting the price too much.
Increased communication between blockchains would enable the movement of assets across different chains, increasing the liquidity in the entire crypto ecosystem.
Users that have ARB in their Meta Mask wallet will be able to pay the HIVE fee to create a Hive account.
We are now witnessing the tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs) such as art and real estate. Imagine if we can send NFTs representing RWAs from one blockchain to another!
Maximalism, especially Bitcoin maximalism, is stupid. The sooner we understand that blockchain interoperability is slowly allowing us to harness different functionality on different blockchains with an increasingly seamless user experience.
In my opinion, we will one day get to a point we won't even know we're using multiple protocols.
Heck, we might even be able to order chicken al pastor burritos paid with $HBD you earned form blogging. Wouldn't that be something?
What are your thoughts on blockchain interoperability?
images created using Mid Journey
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