Go multichain today

In 2021, interest in NFTs exploded: their sales grew from thousands of USD to hundreds of millions of USD per month. NFTs also expanded from Ethereum to other chains: BSC, Solana, Fantom, Avalanche, etc. However, NFT ecosystems on different blockchains remain insular and isolated. They can’t exchange assets or liquidity.

While there are lots of fungible token bridges (which are straightforward to build), there are very few NFT bridging solutions - and those that do exist connect only EVM chains (such as Ethereum and Polygon), or at most one non-EVM network (such as Solana or Elrond) to an EVM one. XP.NETWORK fills this gap, connecting all the isolated ecosystems both EVM and non-EVM into a global network of interoperable markets.

XP.NETWORK has two target groups of users:

What are the main use cases?

1. Cross-chain games: teams of players spread across the blockchains can collect NFT-based artifacts or mine resources and send them from one network to another.
2. Cross-chain marketplaces: platforms can save thousands of dollars and developer-hours by using our library to allow the users to buy NFTs issued on other chains and pay in a currency of their choice.
3. NFT projects wishing to gain global presence and maximize sales volume and liquidity.

EVM stands for Ethereum Virtual Machine - a major invention that differentiates Ethereum from Bitcoin. EVM allows developers to add and run third-party code on a live blockchain without stopping it. It uses Solidity, the first smart contract language.

All the chains that have adopted EVM support Solidity, the MetaMask wallet, Web3 tools, Ethereum’s JavaScript libraries, etc. The infrastructure built for one such chain can be reused on all the others with minimal changes, and their token standards are very similar.

Non-EVM blockchains use their own virtual machines, token standards, and smart contract language, such as Rust, C++, TEAL, Michelson, ink!, Plutus, etc. Such chains can have technical advantages over EVM networks, but few developers know the necessary languages, so building a non-EVM chain is very hard work.

Because of the complexity involved, there are very few non-EVM NFT bridges. That’s why the creation of such a bridge is a big event for the industry. XP.NETWORK is currently the only NFT bridge for Elrond, Tezos, and Algorand.

We're currently scaling the bridge relay validator network and working on minimizing target chain transaction fees. We've introduced and audited support for ERC-1155 smart contracts, custom collection names on target chains, and - for the first time in the history of the industry - transferring NFTs while retaining the logic of the original smart contracts.

In 2022, we plan to integrate several more important ecosystems, including Solana, EOS, NEAR, Cardano, and Cosmos.

Right now we’re building at breakneck speed; if the validators were already decentralized, they’d have to run upgrades every couple of days to catch up with the code updates. This is impractical and unsafe, since the team would have no guaranteed way to inform all the anonymous validators that they have to install an update - or to make sure they all do it.

Once the development pace slows down a bit, we will outsource bridge validation to third parties, incentivizing community members and industry influencers to further secure the bridge by decentralizing it.