Thread by @chainlink

1/ Smart contract adoption is no longer isolated to any one network.

Instead, there is now a growing diversity of layer-1 blockchains, sidechains, and layer-2 rollups, presenting developers with a significant opportunity.

A thread on cross-chain smart contracts 🧵

2/ The growth of the multi-chain ecosystem over the past year came as a result of user demand for low-cost transactions.

The introduction of new on-chain environments, with each network offering unique advantages, gave developers and users alike more choice & flexibility.

3/ As a result, many devs began deploying their existing smart contract code across multiple blockchain networks, creating multi-chain smart contracts.

These contracts enabled projects to increase their user base and even experiment with new features in lower-cost environments.

4/ While multi-chain smart contracts offer many advantages, deployments across different chains are limited or entirely lacking in interoperability.

This can lead to liquidity fragmentation, end-user friction, and an inconsistent UX.

5/ Cross-chain communication offers devs a way to overcome these limitations through the creation of cross-chain smart contracts.

These contracts consist of separate contracts on different blockchains that intercommunicate to create a single unified decentralized application.

6/ This enables developers to split up their dApp's logic into modular components that run on different chains, all while staying in sync & working towards a common goal.

From cross-chain collateralized loans to automated multi-chain yield farming, the use cases are limitless.

7/ However, the creation of cross-chain smart contracts requires secure infrastructure to facilitate the transfer of both data and tokens between chains.

As a blockchain-agnostic protocol, the #Chainlink Network is well-positioned to support cross-chain interoperability.

8/ The Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) is a global open-source standard that leverages the existing network of hyper-reliable Chainlink nodes. Together with the Anti-Fraud Network, CCIP will help enable smart contracts to securely inter-communicate across chains.

9/ Just as nobody could fully predict all of the future use cases enabled by the Internet in the early 1990s, the most innovative use cases enabled by cross-chain smart contracts have yet to be discovered.

Learn more:
blog.chain.link/cross-chain-sm…