We’ve been discussing the L2 & L3 landscape more recently, amidst more interest from protocol teams and users alike in this area. From Degen chain leveraging L3s via Arbitrum orbit, to Ronin chain recently announcing permissionless gaming chains via Polygon’s zkEVM, the trend of protocols gravitating toward their own chain even if it isn’t 100% necessary is playing out in real-time. Along the way, interoperability protocols and protocols that help to provide infrastructure for rollups will stand to gain.
In this edition, we’ll be briefing you on Omin Network, a ‘blockchain built to unite all rollups’. Also, be sure to join our Revelo Roundtable later this week, focusing on bridging and interoperability.
Background on Omni Network
Omni is an Ethereum-native interoperability solution purpose-built for the Ethereum ecosystem and rollups. Omni aims to deprecate bridging solutions by offering an interoperability network. It introduces a solution that surpasses traditional bridging mechanisms using open standards.
After its founding in March 2021, the protocol raised a significant amount, $18M from the likes of Pantera Capital, Two Sigma Ventures, Hased, Spartan Group, and Jump Crypto. With layer-2 scaling causing liquidity fragmentation across different rollups, Omni aims to simplify the user experience by providing seamless movement between these layers. The rapid growth of rollups recently has led to liquidity fragmentation challenges where moving between different rollups is complex and time-consuming for users. Omni seeks to enhance developer experience by enabling easy access to a broader market base across all rollups while maintaining security standards.
Cross-chain rollups enable transferring messages across networks and programming global applications. Omni Network aims to achieve subsecond finality, relying on Ethereum’s finality for sourcing truth. Despite Ethereum’s 15-minute layer-1 finality, subsecond finality is crucial for enhancing user experience. Omni Network nodes monitor state updates on rollups, providing a global view of Ethereum’s activities.
The integration of pre-confirmations technology in Omni Network will streamline data relay across different rollup platforms. Through Omni Network, users will experience seamless transitions between various applications without being aware of underlying rollup differences. This kind of abstraction has long been cited as an endgoal of crypto, to simply be the invisible rails that frontend users don’t have to know or care about.
Omni stands out by being purpose-built for the Ethereum ecosystem, securing it with ETH for enhanced scalability. Unlike other solutions using newly issued tokens for security, Omni leverages $ETH’s liquidity and stability. ~$600 million $ETH is allocated to securing Omni from the start, ensuring high-level security. The team is aware of and will manage risks associated with restaking, price volatility, etc.
Open Liquidity Network
The Open Liquidity Network initiative, powered by Omin Network, has partnered with protocols including Injective, Mantle, Sushi, Kanto, and Flow, as well as various LST/LRT protocols. The protocol aims to “establish and popularize multiple open standards serving all key stakeholders across the Ethereum rollup ecosystem”.
The Open Liquidity Network introduces xERC tokens, a new open token standard. xERC aims to be a standard that those issuing new tokens may use increasingly more over time, recognizing that it’s in everyone’s best interest to use the same interoperability standard. Existing ERC20 tokens can be converted into xERCs via a ‘lock box contract’, which locks the original token and mints equivalent xERCs. The original ERC20s can be returned at any time in exchange for the newly minted xERCs.
This initiative aims to unify the various interoperability solutions that use their own token standards that are incompatible with one another.
Insights from Omni Co-Founder
Omni Network was co-founded by Austin King and Tyler Tarsi. Austin’s background includes developing the Interledger Network, focusing on interoperability for layer-2 solutions, dubbed ‘Strata’. The Interledger Network achieved high-performance levels, processing over 4,000 payments per second and exceeding 10 billion transactions before being sold to Ripple. Austin envisions eliminating the need for manual asset transfers between applications for users. The team will focus on scalability within the Ethereum network for global usability.
Omni Network has also teased an airdrop, potentially to be announced later this week. It seems likely that Milady holders will receive an allocation based on some tweets involving the NFT collection.
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