Comment
Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
The birth of Bitcoin led to a Cambrian explosion of blockchains with different design decisions and use cases. While these distributed ledgers serve different purposes, they existed (and still exist to a certain degree) as silos with limited meaningful interaction.Similar to the Internet which facilitates different types of computers in different parts of the world to communicate with one another, a similar technology that acts as the connective tissue between blockchains is necessary for true value accrual. The Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol aims to serve this purpose.IBC is a universal interoperability protocol that allows two different blockchains to communicate with one another. IBC guarantees reliable, ordered, and authenticated communication.Perhaps one of the most important properties of IBC is trust-minimization. In blockchains, the property of trust-minimization is inherently linked to security. No distributed system is entirely ‘trustless’. Therefore, the question of security boils down to who or what is trusted, and how can that trust be violated i.e., what does it take for the trusted entity to be corrupted?In this sense, and unlike most bridging solutions, IBC uses no trusted third parties. This means that if you trust two particular chains to use the functions they provide (and by default their consensus mechanisms), then there is no additional trust assumption required while using IBC to interact between said chains.IBC is also more than just a bridge that facilitates token transfers. It is a general-purpose message passing protocol. This means that any form of data can be communicated over IBC.How does IBC work?In order to understand how IBC works, it is important to separate the two different layers of IBC — 1) the transport layer and 2) the application layer.High-level depiction of IBC packet flow between two blockchainsTransport LayerMessages communicated over IBC are transported within data packets. And the transport layer is
Add Comment