IBC is live on Solana, launched as an AVS on Picasso’s Restaking Hub
By 0xbrainjar, Founder & Research Director of Composable
Exclusive from The Solana Hackerhouse, Dubai. Composable is incredibly proud to have launched the first connection between Solana and the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol.
With Solana IBC live on mainnet, users are able to perform cross-chain transactions between Solana and other IBC-enabled chains (Ethereum, Cosmos SDK appchains, and Polkadot and Kusama parachains) in a trust-minimized manner. This makes it easier than ever to tap into valuable cross-chain opportunities and to generate new cross-chain use cases.
Benefits of Solana IBC
Solana is an increasingly popular blockchain, largely due to its many strengths such as its speed and affordability. At the time of writing, there is more than $4.6 billion total value locked (TVL) in Solana DeFi protocols. This places Solana as the blockchain with the 4th largest TVL. Moreover, Solana has the 5th largest market capitalization: over $80 billion. These statistics clearly underscore the massive volume and usership of Solana.
Yet, Solana remains mostly siloed from the rest of the DeFi industry, with no trust-minimized bridging solutions available to and from this ecosystem — until now. To address this issue, Composable has launched a Solana IBC connection to provide users with a more secure and performant bridging solution.
IBC is an ideal bridging solution to unite Solana and other leading blockchain ecosystems. The Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol enables asynchronous communication between two blockchains in a manner that is time- and cost-efficient and secure. Specifically, IBC provides a gold standard for cross-chain communication in a trust-minimized manner, as we have explored in our previous blog here. We have detailed our complete rationale for leveraging IBC in this blog. To summarize, IBC allows users to more easily, quickly, and securely navigate between chains.
For Solana, an IBC connection allows for the development of new cross-chain use cases with other ecosystems, and enables users to seamlessly navigate the cross-chain DeFi space. With the Solana IBC connection, users and developers will be able to implement any kind of cross-chain use case imaginable between Solana and the other IBC-enabled chains, including the interchain, Polkadot, Kusama, and Ethereum.
Thus, the speed, cost-effectiveness, and massive liquidity and usership of Solana can be leveraged from other ecosystems as well. Similarly, developers and protocols on Solana can tap into the benefits of other ecosystems and expand into cross-ecosystem use cases in a trust-minimized manner.
How it Works
There is a reason Composable is the first to launch Solana IBC.
Facilitating a connection between Solana and IBC was no trivial endeavor. Solana’s lack of state proofs initially made it incompatible with the IBC. However, Composable collaborated with the INESC-ID Distributed Systems Group associated with the University of Lisbon to architect a solution to this problem.
Specifically, we have created a guest blockchain system that allows Solana (and, in the future, other IBC-incompatible chains) to become IBC-capable. Technical details of this solution are detailed in this Composable Research forum post. To put it simply, the guest blockchain acts as a sort of layer 2 (L2) chain atop the host blockchain (in this case, Solana). It replicates the host chain, and is able to interoperate with IBC as it has all IBC requirements, including state proofs. A relayer is able to send messages to and from the guest blockchain and other IBC-connected chains, meaning that the host chain (i.e. Solana) is effectively able to communicate over IBC.
Summary
With Solana IBC deployed on mainnet, cross-chain opportunities to and from Solana will be broadened and improved. Assets and liquidity in Solana and other IBC-connected ecosystems can flow between these chains, with new use cases becoming possible.
We at Composable look forward to seeing the benefits and innovation sparked by the new IBC-powered interoperability of Solana, and will continue to connect new chains to IBC to even further improve cross-chain DeFi.
For more information about Composable and how it is architecting the unified DeFi landscape of the future, refer to these useful links:
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