Wanchain – ICON’s and Aion‘s partner in the Blockchain Interoperability Alliance – announced Tuesday the release of Wanchain 3.0, featuring cross-chain transaction capability through Wanchain for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and ERC20 tokens such as MakerDAO’s DAI and MKR.
The development lets Wanchain bridge the blockchain space’s two heaviest hitters, Bitcoin and Ethereum. How, you ask? The Wanchain Foundation explains:
“Wanchain achieved this monumental advancement through its cross-chain mechanism and secure multi-party computation. An example Bitcoin-to-Ethereum cross-chain trade is enabled by Wanchain through locking the native tokens on the respective chains with smart contracts and Storeman nodes, creating a proxy token on Wanchain (e.g. Wanchain-ETH), then releasing the smart contracts for redemption of the coins on the original chain.”
Crypto Briefing’s Andrew Ancheta notes that Wanchain’s solution is still permission-based, though the project aims for a fully decentralized solution to cross-chain transfers of value.
And at CCN, P.H. Mahore explains why users concerned with privacy may soon have reason to cheer Wanchain’s development:
“[Wanchain CEO] Lu says that in the future, public chains like Ethereum and Bitcoin can essentially be represented and shielded with the privacy of Wanchain. While the transparency inherent in Bitcoin is nice, there are plenty of users who wish for more privacy. Lu says that Wanchain uses the Monero style of private transactions. In Monero, at least, a view key is required to even know anything, really, about a given transaction, although the records are publicly accessible.”
Like all blockchain projects, Wanchain is still very much a work in progress. As Basil Kimathi warns on UTB, if blockchain doesn’t achieve mainstream use, or one platform eventually dominates the market, Wanchain may lose its raison d’être.
Still, by bridging Bitcoin and Ethereum, Wanchain 3.0 represents a major step forward in achieving the goal of interconnecting the blockchain space’s countless walled gardens, a development that would encourage more mainstream use of crypto and the underlying technology.
