Cross-chain technology has long been a growing necessity in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space. Since the bull market of 2021, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology have grown exponentially in popularity thanks to the rise of DeFi, NFTs, and overall hype. While many have celebrated crypto’s continued climb to mass adoption, this new wave of users has further highlighted the scalability crisis crypto has been grappling with for years. To combat this, multiple layer 1 and 2 protocols have sprung up promising improved scalability over the competition.

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This onset of new chains proved partially successful, it eased transaction volume from Ethereum, allowed new ecosystems to grow, and provided users with cheaper alternatives and increased ecosystem diversity. While this seemed like a viable temporary solution to the scalability problem, users were often troubled by having their assets spread across a sea of different blockchains. This has highlighted one of the fastest-growing issues facing the crypto space — The lack of interoperability.

The lack of cross-chain infrastructure is nothing new, however, the rapid increase in users and blockchain networks has greatly amplified the need for interoperability. In response to this growing demand, the industry rushed to address the cross-chain crisis by quickly pumping out bridges and cross-chain-friendly applications across the many different blockchain platforms. While this swift action to tackle the interoperability issue could have easily been regarded as a crypto success story, many have argued the opposite was accomplished.

When Cross-chain Infrastructure Fails

Since 2021, cross-chain exploits have riddled the crypto space with fear, uncertainty, and doubt as they’ve been responsible for some of the largest exploits in crypto by dollar value. Till now, cross-chain exploits have racked up over $1.5 billion in losses, making the cross-chain sector into yet another Achilles heel for the cryptocurrency space.

Aside from huge monetary losses, cross-chain hacks can have a severe impact on the protocols and communities they’re serving. An example of this occurred early last November when pNetwork, a cross-chain protocol network alerted its user, ‘GalaGames’ of an exposed misconfiguration in the BNB chain cross-chain bridge smart contract. Upon this discovery, it was found that the error in question could potentially allow an attacker to take ownership of the contract, thus giving them access to mint new tokens and alter pGala at will. To preventively avoid any major exploits, GalaGames issued an emergency notice to all centralized exchanges to suspend trading for the BEP-20-based pGala tokens. Unfortunately, despite the emergency notices, not all exchanges halted trading for the BEP-20-based pGala tokens, this in itself carried unintentional consequences as speculators flocked to capitalize on arbitrage opportunities with DEXs where pNetwork was trying to drain liquidity to help rectify the issue.

While the extent of the debacle was mostly limited to a handful of opportunistic arbitragers, the situation previews a tiny example of what can happen on a larger scale if the industry doesn’t prioritize robust cross-chain infrastructure. Because most major blockchain platforms today focus on decentralization, there’s often no third party to stop certain projects from building new technologies such as cross-chain bridges between certain blockchains and individual projects. Projects and chains that’ve been linked by bridges lacking robustness from other parties are put at huge risk, especially if they themselves weren’t the creators of those bridges. If weak cross-chain infrastructure continues to become the norm in crypto, the exploitations of bridges connecting DeFi apps, blockchains, CBDCs, and even future economies could spell disaster for the crypto space.

Luckily, projects like Wanchain have proved that robust cross-chain technology does exist and has a great future ahead!

What is Wanchain?

Wanchain is a fully EVM-compatible, decentralized blockchain interoperability solution harnessing the latest in blockchain decentralization, interconnectivity, and scalability for commercial, public, personal, and state use. Wanchain works to drive blockchain adoption through interoperability, security, and transparency by having a next-generation blockchain as its foundation equipped with fully decentralized cross-chain bridges that interconnect many of the different existing and future blockchain networks.

For years Wanchain has pioneered one of the most advanced and secure cross-chain infrastructures to date and currently supports 19 different blockchain networks and 45 different assets making it one of the largest and most successful cross-chain platforms in existence. The key to Wanchain’s success has been its stark focus on security, decentralization, and transparency which is reflected by its solid track record in the space.

As the Wanchain standard continues to be adopted by blockchains, projects, and digital assets, hope for a truly safe, fair, and secure crypto future inches ever closer to reality.

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