Wanchain is an infrastructure that connects the decentralized financial world.
The General Manager of Altcoin Buzz, Anindya (Ani) Baidya, anchored the Wanchain AMA session on our Telegram channel with Li Ni, the VP of BD & Ops, and Dr. Weijia Zhang, the VP of Engineering of Wanchain.
Below is a recap of the AMA session with Li Ni and Dr. Weijia Zhang to understand what the platform is about. Notably, the AMA is in three segments: introduction, deep dive, and community questions and answers.
Segment 1: Introduction to Wanchain
Background Information
Q – You have been in blockchain interoperability for a long time. How has the journey been?
Weijia: Wanchain is a decentralized blockchain interoperability solution whose mission is to drive blockchain adoption through interoperability by building fully decentralized and secure bridges that connect the world’s many siloed blockchain networks. Wanchain’s decentralized cross-chain architecture relies on multiple computing technologies to secure the bridges.
Wanchain has built Layer 1 to Layer 1 bridges to Ethereum, Bitcoin, XRP, Avalanche, etc. Wanchain also built Layer 2 to Layer 2 bridges for the Polygon and Arbitrum blockchains.
I have seen tremendous growth in cross-chain technologies in the past several years. I am also co-chairing the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) cross-chain interoperability workgroup with Peter Robinson from ConsenSys to advance cross-chain technology standards and specifications.
Q – Tell us a bit about your team. Where is the team based out of? How many people do you have in Wanchain?
Li Ni: Wanchain consists of a decentralized team spread all over the world. Some colleagues are based in Europe, UK, Netherlands, and some are in the US. Furthermore, we have teams in Asia, China, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia, like Malaysia.
Besides, we also have community management team members from Africa too. Most of the team are engineers. Currently, we have approximately 50 staff on Wanchain.
Segment 2: Deep Dive
More Information About Wanchain
Q – Can you help us understand how cross-chain bridges work (with a focus on Wanchain)?
Weijia: Wanchain is a bridge-focused project. A cross-chain bridge transfers assets from a source chain to a target chain. This is normally done by locking the assets in the source chain and minting the same value of wrapped assets on the target chain.
In Wanchain’s cross-chain tech framework, three main start contracts are deployed. Firstly, one smart contract is deployed on the source chain to handle source assets. A second smart contract is deployed on the target chain to handle target assets. The third smart contract is deployed on the managing chain to handle the registration and staking of bridge nodes.
When a cross-chain transaction is sent by a user, its target chain and target address are specified. Subsequently, the source chain smart contract locks the source token and emits a Lock event.
The storeman or trusted bridge nodes see the lock event and then instruct the target chain smart contract to mint the same value of the token on the target chain.
To bring the token back to the source chain, the owner of the token simply sends a “redeem” transaction to the target chain smart contract. After that, the target chain smart contract then burns the wrapped token and sends out a Burn event.
The storeman nodes see the event and instruct the source chain smart contract to unlock the token on the source chain. The storeman is implemented with multiparty computing, and storeman nodes have stakes to prevent collusion.
For the future, we will also have cross-chain messaging and smart contract call functions on multichain for sure. Moreover, these innovative ideas are being developed right now in-house.
Q – Do you currently have any competition on these solutions? Or are you the first innovator?
Li Ni: This is the first time I and Dr. Weijia will introduce this to the public. And Dr. Weijia is also the co-chair of the interoperability task force committee of the EEA (Ethereum Enterprise Alliance). Dr. Weijia is working closely with those experts on these novel ideas of interoperability practices.
Q – What is your business model? Is your revenue only coming through cross-chain transfer fees, or do you have other products and solutions?
Li Ni: As a public chain project, we are not a profit-seeking organization, and Wanchain Foundation is non-profit. But on the other side, we designed a mechanism to reward WAN token holders with:
- PoS rewards for staking.
- Cross-chain node, which is the Storeman node rewards that these nodes secure all the cross-chain transactions.
Besides, to make the project sustainable, we will charge a small amount of cross-chain tx fee in the future and all fees are going to be rewarded back to nodes. But right now, all cross-chain txes are free. Furthermore, the Wanchain Foundation subsidizes all necessary costs on our own.
Q – How can interoperability usher mass adoption? Can you share with us two case studies (Enterprise and Retail)?
Weijia: Interoperability in our context is about cross-chain interoperability, meaning that assets, data, and even commands can transfer from a source chain to a target chain through some common standards and specifications.
With the interoperability, the blockchains can be uniquely identified and assets and data can move from one blockchain to another without the need to customize the dApps for each blockchain.
Moreover, this will dramatically improve the scalability of asset transfers across the different blockchains. One typical use case features standard-based relayers to pass messages from one blockchain to another. With interoperability, we can design a relay to relay messages for any blockchain that implements the relaying protocol.
Another use case is the cross-chain smart contract function call. With interoperability, smart contracts in one blockchain can call functions of another smart contract in another blockchain.
Q – Which blockchains and assets are you currently connecting (you have named a few in the beginning) and what chains do you plan to connect in the future?
Li Ni: Already 13 layer ones. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Moonriver, Avalanche, Polkadot, XRP, Binance Smart Chain, Dogecoin, EOSIO, Fantom, Litecoin, Matic, Arbitrum, and Wanchain. Three are almost finished to be announced, which are Moonbeam, Optimism, and Cardano.
Today, we just bring the TRON to the engineer’s table, so ANY assets from those networks can use WanBridge. In the future, we are going to connect more chains; a practical move is to connect the top 50 assets/chains listed on CMC first, lol.
Q – You are also building an ecosystem of dApps. Tell us more about how the Wanchain ecosystem looks currently and what is in the pipeline?
Weijia: The Wanchain blockchain itself is a Proof-of-Stake (POS) based blockchain that is fully EVM compatible. Any dApps that are deployed to Ethereum can be migrated to Wanchain as well.
Currently, Wanchain has two types of applications. Firstly, one is ecosystem dApps that are deployed to Wanchain, such as WanSwap, ZooKeeper, Jackpot, Red Packet, etc.
Another type is leveraging the Wanchain crosschain feature to wrap assets to participate in DeFi dApps on another blockchain.
In addition, developers are encouraged to develop new dApps with Wanchain’s cross-chain technology by taking advantage of low transaction fees and high performance.
Segment 3: Community Questions and Answers
For this segment, the five best questions shared 500 $WAN. One of the questions is as follows:
Q. Twitter – Can you tell us more details about the importance of Wanchain T-Bridge Framework 4.0, and how it will solve the problem of interoperability across private to public chains?
Li Ni: That’s Wanchain’s solution for enterprise cross-chain solution. I will share a previous article that we posted that explains the T-bridge solution.
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Disclaimer
The information discussed by Altcoin Buzz is not financial advice. This is for educational, entertainment, and informational purposes only. Any information or strategies are thoughts and opinions relevant to the accepted levels of risk tolerance of the writer/reviewers and their risk tolerance may be different than yours. We are not responsible for any losses that you may incur as a result of any investments directly or indirectly related to the information provided. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are high-risk investments so please do your due diligence. This article has been sponsored by Wanchain. Copyright Altcoin Buzz Pte Ltd.
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