On cross-chain liquidity: Introducing the Router Protocol

As a multi blockchain future becomes a reality, there is a critical need for infrastructure that can port liquidity across chains for the ecosystem to develop.

Ethereum has been great — It is the first Turing-complete, trustless ‘world computer’ of its kind. And we are just tapping into the full potential of Ethereum, which should be unleashed with Eth 2.0 and its transition to POS over the coming months and years.

However the fact remains that, scalability efforts are still in their early days, as most platforms continue with the scalability trilemma — the trade off between decentralization, scalability and security. Layer 2 solutions include Bitcoin’s Lightning network, as well as multiple solutions for Ethereum such as Plasma. Layer 1 solutions include Sharding, as well as consensus protocol changes that inevitably involve various sliding-scale trade offs across the axes of the scalability trilemma. While Eth 2.0 promises tps (transactions per second) figures of over 100000 at some point in the future, there are significant technical hurdles to be overcome before the sharding in ETH 2.0 can get there. In the meanwhile, most major blockchain solutions offer tps figures far less than that seen on Visa, Mastercard or PayPal, which are atleast 1500 tps, even from a conservative standpoint.

Therefore we have multiple efforts addressed towards scalability — In addition to Eth 2.0 there are consensus protocol approaches such as Dfinity, Tezos, Polka and Cosmos as well as Layer 2 solutions such as Matic, Omisego, xDAI etc. There is no one conclusive winner yet, and it might be that the future of blockchains will be multi-chain for quite a while, with a fragmented market with liquidity and developer community dispersed across these.

In this scenario, what will be needed is the infra that will seamlessly port liquidity between these isolated liquidity pools, almost like highways connecting far flung cities. The development of railways starting in the early 1800s helped develop the US economy and laid foundations for it to become the super power of the 20th century; This also led to the development of various cities across the United States. Similarly, cross-chain bridging infrastructure will help promote liquidity migration and developer efforts towards various emerging chains and solutions, and eventually lead to a thriving, bustling blockchain ecosystem.

Router is a cross chain liquidity infrastructure primitive that aims to seamlessly provide bridging infra between various current and emerging layer-1 and layer-2 blockchain solutions, such as Matic and Ethereum.

Progressively, Router plans to build out bridging infra between multiple other chains in its roadmap. Stay tuned as we roll out the product and expand on our roadmap over the coming few weeks.

Website: http://routerprotocol.com/

Telegram: https://t.me/routerprotocol

Telegram announcements: https://t.me/router_ann

Twitter: https://twitter.com/routerprotocol