The key to unparalleled growth in public blockchains
A quick look at the official Lisk’s website regarding the question as to What makes Lisk Unique says:
“We envision a world in which everyone benefits from blockchain. Given this, the Lisk Foundation set itself the goal to inspire blockchain enthusiasts and developers alike. The ultimate goal is to bring talent into the blockchain industry by enabling you to participate in building the decentralized future with our products, whether you are a technical person or not.”
Anyone reading that could see how bold that statement is regarding inclusivity when it says building the decentralized future with our products, whether you are a technical person or not. Other public blockchains with programmability like Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Cosmos etc., are fairing well because of one thing: cross-bridge tools with other networks.
The mesmerizing exploration of new frontiers around the boundaries of decentralized finance that we see today is because of continuous innovation from curious minds. According to DeFi Llama, over $107 billion is locked up in decentralized protocols. While Ethereum, unarguably the largest public blockchain with DeFi protocols, has users staking over $81 billion, Binance Smart Chain is the latest contender capturing almost $19 billion. For context, as at the beginning of February 2021, BSC as Binance Smart Chain is fondly referred to housed just less than a billion-dollar in TVL.
As of the time of writing, even though Compound (one of the earliest OGs of DeFi) ranks number one with $10.75 billion in TVL, PancakeSwap from Binance towers above Uniswap with $8.03 billion TVL. Although Ethereum was the first Turing complete smart contract blockchain, there was a need to unlock the Bitcoin network’s massive liquidity. For that, we had wrapped bitcoin (wBTC). Compound was the first DeFi protocol to integrate it, and as of today, $9.16 billion in BTC is locked up in various Ethereum smart contracts. How about BETH, an anchor token of ETH2.0 issued by Binance on BSC? BETH is a tokenized version of staked ETH on Binance. It’s a simple way to participate in staking on the ETH 2.0 Beacon Chain. As you can see, BETH was floated as a response to Ethereum’s Beacon chain activation. It wasted no time in creating a cross-bridge between Eth 2.0 and the budding Binance Smart Chain network.
What was the effect of that move by Binance Smart Chain? Today we see primarily Ethereum protocols taking advantage of the massive liquidity on Binance Smart Chain. BSC now marshalls as close to 5 million transactions per day. If history is to be studied, blockchain projects will always favour and migrate towards liquidity rich and fast network. And to do that, they need interoperability or, at best, a cross bridge. We saw this in the earliest rise of EOS, even as many ETH projects transitioned to the latter.
What can the Lisk core team and its larger ecosystem learn from this evolution? It is that interoperable bridges between public blockchains are not only essential it is vital to the survival of any network. Innovators are hardly loyal to any network except they see value. This helps innovators building atop of them to easily harness the networks based on their juiciest features. We explained this earlier, citing the Bitcoin example; although it’s a rather stiff network, it’s still the most liquid network with unparalleled security. Innovators cannot overlook this. Hence anyone building financial dapps will always look for opportunities to tap into this.
Quite clearly, Lisk Foundation is set to unveil its Interoperability Solution in this year’s Lisk.js conference slated to hold next month. All eyes will be on it. LiskHQ has already started releasing the solution’s snippets through high-level overview technical documentation detailing the vast improvements it will bring to the Lisk ecosystem. Brilliant blockchain researchers and developers are expected to gather in this edition of Lisk.js.
If not for anything, the Lisk blockchain bears striking similarities with Binance Smart Chain in terms of governance as both are DPoS run networks. Moreso, the Lisk network was established in 2016, way before BSC. Hence, the Lisk network is ripe for dapp explosion, but only if innovators are presented with bridges to other networks to leverage their peculiar strengths.
For more details on the Lisk.js conference happening on the 21st and 22nd of May 2021, visit the Lisk.js official page to learn more.
——————————————–
Lisk Magazine is a project supported by Lisk Italian Group and Lisk Support.
Support our work, vote for Lisk Magazine.
