Wanchain, an Ethereum fork focused on cross-chain integration, announced support for EOS recently. The short story here is that, in the near future, decentralized exchanges facilitating trades between EOS, Ethereum, and Bitcoin – which is increasing its token functionality via Blockstream’s Liquid product.
CCN.com previously reported about how Wanchain creates a bridge between Bitcoin and Ethereum. Its integration with Loopring means that on-chain, decentralized trades between blockchains will be possible. Loopring is actively building a decentralized exchange (DEX) on Wanchain, which will launch next quarter.
The approach differs from Kyber.Network’s Wrapped BTC (WBTC) in that it is non-custodial. WBTC is a custodial service of BitGo which allows users to lock up Bitcoin and access its liquidity on the Ethereum blockchain. When a user purchases WBTC, a merchant “mints” an equivalent amount of WBTC by locking up regular BTC.
Wanchain CEO Jack Liu told CCN.com:
“We are pleased to be integrating EOS into the Wanchain ecosystem, bridging their powerful dApp community to the Ethereum and Bitcoin networks. EOS also has a strong, global developer and block producer network that will be able to leverage Wanchain’s cross-blockchain platform.”
The Wanchain model makes this unnecessary. A user with a Bitcoin wallet and and Ethereum wallet can lock up their Bitcoin themselves and use a similar “wrapped” token. The difference is that the user can be self-reliant. BitGo stresses the value of their custodial services, but decentralization advocates will prefer a self-service model like this.
Wanchain itself periodically adds ERC-20 tokens. Friday’s community conference also included an announcement that USD Coin and True USD have been added to the list of ERC-20 tokens readily able to access via Wanchain. The Basic Attention Token is also available. The protocol is open source, like most cryptocurrency projects, so any Ethereum project can add its token. The addition of EOS means that any EOS project can do the same.
One might wonder why such an intersection is necessary, and there are multiple answers to this question. First is liquidity. Wanchain is providing a main entrance to multiple liquidity portals – Ethereum, Ethereum-based stablecoins, and Bitcoin.
But Wanchain’s other advantage is enabling a user to control their crypto assets all in one place, and later, to trade them in a decentralized fashion. They aim to eventually provide connectivity for all major blockchains. They are planning more integrations already.
Wanchain’s Dan Reecer told us:
“It was an exciting day for the Wanchain community, as we hosted our first ever community conference call. We had roughly 150 participants from all over the world engaging with questions and excitement around our recent progress.”
The last piece of news released Friday by the Wanchain team is the move to proof-of-stake . They are implementing a proof-of-stake protocol, just like Ethereum plans to do, A company called Staked, which handles institutional staking for companies like Coinbase, is helping with its integration.