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Cross-chain Interoperability Alliance Roundtable: Discussing a New Cross-chain Approach

November 28, 2023

Tigran Bolshoi participated in the Cross-chain Interoperability Alliance Roundtable earlier this month in Istanbul to discuss cross-chain interoperability, which is currently one of the Kinetex team's main focuses.

The team believes that one way to achieve this is by creating practical and effective solutions to change cross-change trades, making them far more convenient, easy, and cheap. Only in this way can the blockchain community help crypto and DeFi services become more widespread. 

At the roundtable, Bolshoi had a chance to discuss intents and Kinetex’s new resolving approach in a more informal setting, surrounded by industry leaders who are passionate about the decentralized future that is collaborative, innovation-driven, and secure.

Bolshoi started with challenges that cross-chain regularly struggles with, including safety concerns, poor user experience, and excessive gas payments and fees. Firstly, several factors can compromise the security of cross-chain bridges, two of the most major ones being third-party validators and wrapped tokens. The first can become a weak point in the bridge’s system, being attacked, damaged, or compromised in any other way by hackers. Wrapped tokens negatively affect liquidity, leading to liquidity fragmentation and insufficiency. So, an approach that can eliminate those two components has a chance at being a successful and — which is extremely important — secure alternative.

Secondly, poor user experience, along with long execution periods, complicates the swapping process to the extent it scares away potential users who do not have enough experience to figure out everything on their own. Users have to perform many actions to swap various assets, such as switching wallets, searching for the optimal routes for multi-part swaps, finding better rates, and so on. Such complexity hinders the adoption of services offered by DeFi, obstructing it from attracting more users and, consequently, more investors who can support the development of more user-oriented solutions. 

Thirdly, excessive gas payments and fees during cross-chain trades often make the process utterly uneconomical. It further complicates the swap process by making users manage native coins for gas payments and find platforms with better swap conditions. 

During his short presentation, Bolshoi talked about a new approach based on intents and resolvers that can help to overcome such challenges. By using intents, users do not need to decide how to achieve the desired outcome, which is receiving specific crypto assets, as all responsibility is shifted to resolvers (a name for professional market makers in the Kinetex ecosystem), allowing for more flexibility when completing orders. Another vital component of this approach is Zk light clients presented by Kinetex at the ETHGlobal hackathon this year. They help to enable instantaneous swaps between users and resolvers while eliminating the need to rely on third-party validators, use cross-chain bridges, and pay excessive gas fees. The team explores this approach while developing Flash Trade, the upcoming Kinetex dApp mode. 

Bolshoi and the rest of the team were happy to participate in such a fantastic event and talk about cross-chain solutions that can alter the future of DeFi. Stay tuned for upcoming updates on the revolutionary Flash Trade. 

Kinetex Network: Website | Kinetex dApp