In real life, if an island needs more people or commerce, it needs to be:
- known
- attractive
- well-connected
If an island is closer to the mainland or other islands, then bridges become the easiest way to travel and move goods between them.
If the island is in the middle of the Pacific with nothing but water nearby, bridges are not an option. Then, they'd better have a highly developed seaport. If its location is not close to maritime ship routes, then this option is not so viable either.
Then they'd better have the infrastructure for air traffic. If it's so far away that going there isn't worth the fuel, or too small to build an airport, then it's pretty much a closed ecosystem.
However, if a closed ecosystem is a goldmine and it becomes known, ways will be found to connect it.
In the crypto space, Bitcoin is mainland. Maybe EVMs can be considered almost a second mainland. Everything is an island or a cluster of islands, of different sizes. Their success long term depends on how well-connected they are.
In yesterday's Week through Adrian's Lenses, one of the news related to the intention of INLEO team to create a swap service, probably using Thorchain at the backend.
That makes a lot of sense in my mind and others, on multiple levels. First, because it's a swap service and it can easily be controlled through the interface what coins and tokens are listed by default (without adding their custom token smart contract address), and which of them are highlighted.
None of the Hive-related token smart contracts on EVM chains are added by default to the prominent swap services, they all need to be added manually. Not to mention when you do such an operation, you are faced with a warning that the issuer is not known and you are adding it at your own risk. Or something similar, I may not remember exactly.
The second reason why this makes sense (or maybe the first by importance) is because it offers Hive a direct link to another ecosystem, Thorchain. Even more importantly, a non-EVM chain. And through it, indirect connections with others.
Now, as we know, there is a lot of tribalism in crypto, which I've said numerous times is counterproductive in a decentralized world. But it is what it is. That tribalism exists on Hive as well. I imagine, just like not everyone on Hive uses the INLEO front end (which in my opinion is a good thing for the decentralization aspect of Hive), they might not use other services from the LeoVerse, preferring others. Although, I'm pretty sure some Hivers don't use INLEO but use HiveStats, for example. In some cases it's not a matter of tribalism but simply of preference or getting used to something and being difficult to switch.
And here is where my idea comes.
We know Hive @Keychain has on the roadmap its extension toward becoming a browser wallet for other ecosystems too. Ethereum / EVM first, from what I know.
We also know that through its browser extensions and mobile apps, Hive Keychain is used by the majority of Hivers. Both browser extensions Metamask-style and mobile apps for crypto are popular, so it's potentially a great way to attract users from outside the ecosystem too.
I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to build bridges between the supported ecosystems (Hive and Ethereum / EVMs, in the first phase) that would be accessible via the Keychain browser extensions and the mobile apps. The bridges could be linked to existing ones or new ones (from VSC, for example) that are being built by other teams (just an interface to easily reach them), or built by the Keychain team itself. There is also the matter of providing liquidity to both sides of the bridge, and for this reason, it would be probably better (and easier) to simply link to existing bridges, at least in the first phase.