ICON Bridge has a use case. Or at least it will when it’s released.
Trippy collaborative DeFi game Wonderland will apparently use ICON Bridge to facilitate cross-chain NFT minting between ICON and the Harmony blockchain, where the game is currently in development.
According to the ICON Foundation:
“With ICON Bridge, users will be able to use ICX on the ICON blockchain to mint Wonderland NFTs on Harmony, which are then stored in a Harmony wallet.”
This is actually quite interesting as it demonstrates why ICON is no mere bridge.
Wonderland could have chosen to simply make users first bridge ICX to Harmony before minting NFTs on Harmony, with transaction fees paid in Harmony’s native cryptocurrency, ONE.
ICON Bridge, however, provides a generic messaging feature that “allows for complex use cases beyond basic token transfers.” This lets connected blockchains perform cross-chain smart contract calls.
In the case of Wonderland, this means users can mint NFTs on Harmony by interacting with a smart contract on ICON, paying mint fees in ICX.
Wonderland will run its own Service Handler to facilitate cross-chain messaging. This is apparently a basic feature of BTP — from digitaldave’s excellent “explain it to me like I’m five” explanation of BTP:
“There are Service Handler contracts living on each and every BTP integrated blockchain.
Service Handlers lock up outgoing tokens on the origin chain, whilst minting new tokens on the destination chain.
They are always communicating directly with the Message Center.”
Wonderland’s Service Handler will include application-specific logic, but the takeaway is that said logic includes discounted minting costs for users paying with ICX.
As the ICON Foundation summarizes:
“Cross-chain NFT minting is an innovative use case for interoperability, and we are excited to see the application of ICON Bridge for this purpose. With ICON Bridge, Wonderland players will be able to use native ICX to mint NFTs representing in-game characters and items on the Harmony blockchain. In addition to connecting blockchains on a technical level, Wonderland’s usage of ICON Bridge will also allow for more meaningful connections between the ICON and Harmony communities.”
Wonderland is a collaborative DeFi game launching on the Harmony and ICE blockchains.
Inspired by Alice and Wonderland, the P2E risk protocol game allows characters in the game to risk and gain Mushroom Tokens — $SHROOM — from each other.
The three characters Alice, Queen and Cards will have unique NFTs and abilities to play strategic risk games with their $SHROOM to gain even more.
The game also has strategic partnerships with GangstaBet and ICONOsphere.
You can learn more about the game by listening to the latest Eye on ICON, which features an interview with Artechist from the Wonderland team.
Wonderland wants to launch its first NFT sale in early May using ICON Bridge. That would suggest that ICON Bridge will also be launching in early May, though updates will be forthcoming in the monthly dev update which goes out every first week of the month, i.e., next week.
