Now Create Cross-Chain NFTs and Mint them using Router CrossTalk

Router Protocol
4 min readNov 2, 2022

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Understanding Fungibility

Regular money is fungible — meaning two can be interchanged with the end result being indistinguishable. For example, if you give your friend a dollar and they give you a dollar in return, no real change has occurred. One dollar is the same as another. Non-fungible assets are different.

Suppose you and your friend swapped cars. The end result is completely different — you clearly have a different car. One car is distinguishable from another. A car is non-fungible because it has unique characteristics that differentiate it from another — even one of the same make and model.

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are blockchain-native assets that possess unique codes and metadata. These codes and metadata distinguish them from each other. Some NFT’s are more valuable than others because they possess rare characteristics — making them scarce and highly desirable. Oftentimes NFT’s are used to represent real-world fungible items like real estate, artwork, property rights, and even personal identities. The possibilities for innovation with NFT’s are only limited by the creativity of developers.

A Fragmented Ecosystem

As the crypto markets have grown over the past few years, blockchain networks have become increasingly isolated. While cross-chain bridge protocols have emerged to solve liquidity fragmentation, these solutions have been solely focused on fungible assets. Users typically lock their funds in a contract on one chain, and unlock assets on the destination chain — but this only works because those assets are fungible. The original assets remain locked on the origin chain.

In order for the NFT ecosystem to continue to mature, cross-chain NFT infrastructure is a must. The blockchain proliferation is not limited to blockchains — but to communities and infrastructure as well. For example, a metaverse to be inclusive should function on all chains and not gate-keep users on the choice of their chain. Same goes for the characters and other non fungible assets which are getting created in games — for them to be truly interoperable we need to make sure that they can be used across different chains and for achieving this cross-chain NFT infrastructure is a must.

Choosing a chain to mint NFTs on is hard when there are so many L1s and L2s in development. Contracts that connect NFTs from one chain and layer to another are a must. Leo Chen, a Coinbase Product Manager, said, “Cross Chain NFTs are the foundation and portal to the Metaverse.” Router Protocol has been building the exact tools needed to solve this. The communities are fragmented and spread across different chains and it’s only optimal that NFTs are available across the chains as well.

Router’s CrossTalk Library allows chains to interact and transfer the data necessary to mint NFTs on one chain and burn them on another. This maintains the scarcity and fungibility of tokens, while empowering users to move NFT’s to and from their preferred networks.

More here: https://dev.routerprotocol.com/crosstalk-library/cross-chain-nfts-using-crosstalk

Join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/yjM2fUUHvN if you need any help integrating

Cross-Chain Minting

Now that we have achieved cross-chain NFT’s, we must tackle the other issue that users face: moving funds to mint. Users face a complicated and uphill battle when doing cross-chain mints, as they must already have funds on the destination chain to complete the mint function. They would have to first bridge funds to the destination chain, and then complete the NFT cross-chain mint.

In a true cross-chain world, funds are chain-agnostic. It shouldn’t matter if funds are on chain “A” — users should still be able to mint on-chain “B”. Router has solved this problem too — truly commencing the start of the cross-chain NFT era and unlocking countless possibilities for users and developers alike. CrossTalk allows users to pay the cross-chain fee on the origin chain rather than the destination chain — circumventing the prerequisite step of bridging funds.

More here: https://dev.routerprotocol.com/crosstalk-library/using-crosstalk-to-mint-nfts-across-chains

If you are from an NFT project who would like to enable cross-chain minting of NFTs — get in touch with us now at @atenkrotos

Feel free to schedule a call with our partnerships team: https://calendly.com/router-partnerships/router-partnerships-call

In order to thrive, Web 3.0 must be interoperable. Without interoperability, Web 3.0 is just a conglomeration of subnets that become increasingly isolated and obsolete. The infrastructure provided by Router is the glue that will hold the new web together.

About Router Protocol

Router Protocol is building a suite of cross-chain liquidity infra primitives that aims to seamlessly provide bridging infrastructure between current and emerging Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchain solutions.

Website: https://routerprotocol.com/

Whitepaper: https://docs.routerprotocol.com/whitepaper/abstract

Twitter: https://twitter.com/routerprotocol

Telegram: https://t.me/routerprotocol

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

Discord: https://discord.gg/yjM2fUUHvN

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Router Protocol

Router Protocol is a secure, composable, and modular framework for building interoperable applications. More at https://routerprotocol.com