Wanchain AMA with Marketing Director Temujin Louie

Wanchain is a decentralized blockchain interoperability system that makes it possible for developers to create decentralized cross-chain applications that can power the future of DeFi.

The General Manager of Altcoin Buzz, Anindya Baidya, anchored the Wanchain AMA session on our Telegram channel with Temujin Louie, Wanchain’s Director of Marketing.

Besides, below is a recap of the AMA session with Temujin Louie to understand what they are about. Also, the AMA is in three segments: introduction, deep dive, and community questions and answers.

Segment 1: Introduction to Wanchain

Background Information
Q – Tell us a bit about yourself and your involvement with Wanchain.

My name is Temujin Louie, and as Ani mentioned, I am Wanchain’s Director of Marketing. I lead Wanchain’s marketing department and am responsible for all branding and communications.

I’m a marketing and communications specialist with extensive experience in tech startups and a long history with crypto. In fact, my blockchain journey began more than 10 years ago when I studied Bitcoin’s impact on incumbent power structures as a grad student at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Q – Give us a broad overview of Wanchain and its various offerings.

Wanchain is one of the true veterans of the blockchain industry, having officially launched in late 2017. Our mission is to drive blockchain adoption through interoperability by bridging the world’s many siloed blockchain networks.

I like to describe Wanchain as being a project with two pillars: a Layer 1 PoS blockchain and a Wide Area Network of blockchains.

Our Layer 1 PoS blockchain is a full Ethereum-like environment that works with industry-standard Ethereum tools, dApps, and protocols. It is extremely fast and gas fees are incredibly low. It’s one of the best performing EVM blockchains in the industry, having run uninterrupted for four-and-a-half years.

Our Wide Area Network of blockchains is a decentralized system of direct, non-custodial crosschain bridges that connect both EVM and non-EVM networks without requiring any centralized intermediaries and without enforcing the use specific communication protocols (like IBC). We’re far more flexible than that.

These bridges are at the cutting edge and are the most secure bridges on the market. We currently connect more than 17 Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks including, but not limited to, Arbitrum, Avalanche C-Chain, Bitcoin, BNB Chain, Ethereum, Fantom, Litecoin, OKC, Polkadot Relay Chain, Polygon, XDC Network, XRP Ledger, and OKC, with many more in the pipeline including Tron and Cardano.

Segment 2: Deep Dive

More Information About Wanchain
Q – Out of the two pillars, let us focus on the 2nd one. What are the different types of cross-chain bridge solutions of Wanchain?

Wanchain’s currently offers several different kinds of bridging solutions. We have:

  • Layer 1 to Layer 1 bridges
  • Layer 1 to Layer 2 bridges
  • Layer 2 to Layer 2 bridges
  • NFT bridges

There’s several different mechanisms we use to make these bridges work, including the classic “Lock-Mint-Burn-Unlock” method and the “Liquidity Pool” method.

For those who might not know, with the “Lock-Mint-Burn-Unlock” method, the user first locks their assets (lets say BTC) on the source chain (Bitcoin) before receiving a wrapped asset (wrapped BTC) on the destination chain (Ethereum).

With liquidity pools, there is a pool of assets (lets say USDT) on multiple chains (Ethereum and OKC). When a user deposits assets into the pool on the source chain (deposit USDT on Ethereum), they get the same number of assets from the pool on the destination chain (USDT on OKC).

The long-term goal for us, though, is to get to the point where we are executing cross-chain function calls. In other words, our vision is that we will be able to call a function in a smart contract on Blockchain B directly from a smart contract on Blockchain A.

We still have some way to go, but we’ll get there. And it will change everything.

Q – We are excited about the NFT bridge. Cross-chain NFT bridges is a relatively new concept. How does it work in Wanchain?

Cross-chain NFT bridges are an exciting avenue that we’ve been working on! They use a mechanism somewhat similar to “Lock-Mint-Burn-Unlock” — but with a twist.

There’s are several considerations that must be taken for NFTs that aren’t needed when bridging fungible tokens. For instance, what do these NFTs represent? Are they:

  • Physical assets such as houses, cars, or artworks (single copy)
  • Virtual collectables such as digital art or collectable cards (multiple copies)
  • Certificates such as birth certificates, diplomas (non-transferable)
  • “Negative value” assets such as loans, burdens, and other responsibilities

Each of these scenarios have implications to NFT cross-chain bridges (for example, an NFT that represents a birth certificate is likely to be a soulbound token). If a token is non-transferable, how can it be bridged?

Admittedly, things are a little more straightforward with digital art NFTs, which are the bulk of NFTs today. Here, all we need to account for are how each NFT (or collection) manages the NFT attributes and how they store/access the digital art.

We also need to know if these attributes can be updated (quite common in GameFi).

The way we are currently solving this issue is that our NFT bridges have bots that monitor the original NFT. Whenever a change occurs to the original NFT’s attributes, the bot applies the same change to the cross-chain NFT.

Ultimately, we will continue to improve the method. The final goal is that NFTs become “Mint Once, Use Anywhere.”

Q – In terms of security, what is Wanchain’s solution to bridge security vulnerabilities?

Probably the most important issue facing bridge makers today. We’ve all seen the headlines of all those other bridges getting hacked and users losing their life savings.

And although a lot of this gets lost in the media coverage, it’s important to note that basically every single cross-chain bridge hack that we’ve seen this year has not been due to a shortcoming in cross-chain technology itself. Rather, the hacks were possible because of careless design decisions and mistakes by overly aggressive development teams. Harsh to say, but true.

At Wanchain, we take a very systematic approach when building our cross-chain solutions. We begin by researching the theory (most projects skip this step). Then we publish papers to get feedback from other experts in the field. We then move on to the engineering side of things where multiple, separate internal dev teams review the work. Once all the teams sign off, we go through a rigorous testing process. And only then, after every step is passed, do we launch.

Because of this, Wanchain’s bridges are at the cutting edge of security. Unlike other bridges who use things like multisig or weighted multisig (or are even totally centralized and they are just lying…), we use real Secure Multiparty Computing and a combination of well-tested cryptographic techniques, including Shamir’s Secret Sharing, to secure cross-chain assets.

More Information

Additionally, all our bridge nodes are permissionless and rotated monthly, and the bridges’ assets are overcollateralized, meaning not only are the original assets locked safely on the source chain, but the bridge nodes themselves stake enough WAN tokens to cover the value of bridged assets.

As a final note, Wanchain’s VP of Engineering, Dr. Weijia Zhang, is one of the leading voices in the development of cross-chain standards. In addition to designing Wanchain’s cross-chain infrastructure, Dr. Zhang serves as the Regional Head of China for the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and is co-chain of their Cross-chain Interoperability Workgroup.

He’s actually the co-author of the EEA’s cross-chain security guidelines. So, we take great care in ensuring that Wanchain is always at the forefront of cross-chain security research.

Segment 3: Community Questions and Answers

Notably, for this segment, the five best questions shared $500 worth of $WAN. One of the questions is as follows:

Q. Twitter – Could you please let us know how your contract audit is progressing? Is Wanchain safe to use? Is everyone totally doxxed? We must be upfront with everything to achieve investor trust, and I’m curious as to how Wanchain accomplishes this?

Wanchain has already completely several audits, which can be found on our Github. The core team is also public and has often appeared at events and in interviews. And finally, as I mentioned above, we do everything we can to make our solutions as secure as can possibly be.

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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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