Original source: veDAO
Original author: TrendX
As the Ethereum ecosystem grows, it will become extremely difficult to expand transaction throughput and reduce costs on Ethereum Layer1 while maintaining its high security. Over time, various proposals have attempted to solve this problem: payment channels, state channels, and Plasma, to name a few. However, these proposals usually sacrifice security to achieve their goals. However, it is the emergence of these proposals that allows the Rollup solution to continue to improve.
Omni Network aims to connect different Rollup solutions, by integrating Ethereum's re-staking protocol EigenLayer and Cosmos SDK into a unified platform, aggregating Ethereum's modular ecosystem, enabling developers to build global applications on all Layer2s on Ethereum while getting security from ETH itself. In this way, the security of Ethereum, the speed and programmability of Cosmos are taken into account at the same time, so that developers can access more users, and users themselves can more easily access new innovative applications.
Features of Omni Network
The current blockchain ecosystem tends to be highly decentralized. As more and more Layer 2 projects are deployed to the mainnet, it can be seen that Ethereum's liquidity network effect continues to decrease as user funds are isolated in an isolated environment. In addition, many Layer 2 projects plan to build their own Layer 3 ecosystems, which will further decentralize liquidity and users.
What makes Omni Network different from other cross-chain protocols is that Omni Network believes that the current Rollup solution in the Ethereum Layer2 track has solved Ethereum's scalability problem, but different Rollups cannot interact with each other, resulting in liquidity being fragmented and divided among different L2 networks. Not only does the user experience greatly decrease, but it also makes Ethereum more divided than ever before.
Therefore, Omni Network aims to become the "Ethereum interoperability infrastructure", providing interoperability for Rollup networks such as Optimism, Arbitrum, zkSync, and Starkware, becoming the core infrastructure for all Rollup networks and modular applications on Ethereum, and achieving a seamless and secure cross-Rollup user experience. In general, there are three characteristics:
Security: Ethereum Restaking
Omni Network uses the Ethereum restakers protocol EigenLayer to achieve security from Ethereum itself while meeting interoperability requirements. Omni Network consists of validators, running both Ethereum nodes and integrated Rollup nodes, re-staking ETH through validators, and proving the status updates of Rollup to promote global interoperability.
Omni Network sets a new standard for cross-modular blockchain security. By leveraging a re-staking mechanism, Omni Network is the first blockchain that can achieve fully customizable functionality and still gain security from Ethereum.
Efficiency: Tendermint consensus
By leveraging Tendermint PoS consensus, Omni Network validators can reach consensus on the state of a Rollup an order of magnitude faster than Ethereum Layer 1.
Omni Network combines Tendermint with ETH's re-staking architecture to ensure fast settlement of Rollup. By layering on a programmable/stateful layer compatible with EVM, developers can build applications that access state, transactions, users, and crypto assets from all Rollups. In this way, Omni Network achieves the high speed provided by Tendermint while ensuring security.
Functionality: Full EVM compatibility
In addition, Omni itself is a programmable, stateful platform, so developers can take advantage of its fast settlement and secure interoperability to build native cross-Rollup applications. Compared to applications deployed on different networks that are isolated from each other, Omni Network's programmable interoperability will provide cross-Rollup applications with economic advantages through properties such as multi-Rollup liquidity aggregation.
Omni's execution layer is compatible with the EVM and is implemented by Ethermint (an EVM module) on Cosmos, so developers can develop using the Solidity tools they are familiar with. The execution layer includes built-in functions to access states, messages, and applications from integrated Rollups, creating a seamless experience for accessing users and liquidity. By building a programmable interoperability layer, Omni will empower developers to create applications that are globally applicable by default, reducing the complexity of developer operations.
Project Progress
Omni Network announced on April 26 this year that it had completed a $18 million financing round, with participation from Pantera Capital, Two Sigma Ventures, Jump Crypto, Hashed, The Spartan Group, etc. Omni Network said that its core technical partners include Ethereum re-staking protocol EigenLayer, as well as Ethereum Layer2 expansion networks Arbitrum, Polygon, StarkWare, Scroll, Linea, etc.
Omni Network will launch the Omni Network public testnet in the third quarter of 2023 and plans to launch the first version of the mainnet in 2024 in collaboration with major Rollup partners such as Arbitrum, Polygon zkEVM, Scroll, ConsenSys’ Linea, and Starkware.
Omni Network Application Scenario Outlook
Although Omni Network has not yet launched a testnet, its goal to achieve a seamless and secure cross-Rollup user experience through the core infrastructure of modular applications has attracted a lot of attention.
On May 3, Omni Network held an AMA with the Starkware and Kakarot teams to discuss how Omni Network plans to expand Starknet liquidity and other issues. Omni Network stated that Starknet applications will be able to leverage Omni Network's interoperability infrastructure to pull more liquidity from the rest of Ethereum into the Starknet ecosystem. This means that without increasing the complexity of the end-user experience, developers will be able to provide their applications across the entire Ethereum ecosystem while still maintaining the performance advantages of Cairo.
In addition, there are many future application scenarios for Omni Network, such as:
- Cross-rollup margin accounts and leveraged trading: post margin on one domain and trade using that margin on a separate domain;
- Multi-rollup NFT Mint: Users of NFT projects are no longer restricted to a single ecosystem, allowing users to mint NFTs from any domain;
- Cross-rollup lending: deposit collateral on one domain and borrow against that collateral on another domain;
- Cross-rollup liquidity mining: Coordinate all liquidity operations from Omni, moving funds across protocols and domains from one place.
By obtaining security from ETH, Omni Network intends to reconnect the Ethereum ecosystem into a whole, so that projects on Ethereum are no longer limited to a single Rollup, but can find users and liquidity in the entire Ethereum ecosystem; the impact of this approach on Ethereum as a whole is worth looking forward to.
