The Importance of Interoperability for Web3

Author: 0xCera

Quote: Recently, the well-known crypto website Ambcrypto, with over a million readers, published an article titled "MATCH Chain realizes true interoperability between ecosystems in WEB3," which was reprinted by prominent media outlets such as bitcoinist, coingape, yahoo finance, and bezinga. The article points out that interoperability can break down barriers between major ecosystems and plays an important role in Web3. It also introduces the unique design of the MATCH public chain in the field of interoperability, effectively bringing in traffic from the traditional internet while enabling efficient circulation between different blockchain platforms.

With the upgrades of Ethereum and the emergence of Aptos, the crypto space has been searching for the next narrative after L1, L2, and NFTs. Especially with Web3 aiming for unique extensibility and high performance, not only various public chains but also numerous internet applications are actively exploring to build a bridge to the future Web3 world.

In this context, interoperability is the next most likely dominant narrative, as it can link isolated blockchain ecosystems, creating a new era of exploration and globalization in the digital world. The MATCH Lab is part of this great journey and proposes a unique innovative path.

1. Interoperability is Becoming a Battleground for Web3

Looking at the development of the internet over the past few decades, the essence of the network is "connection." Internet platforms are commercial entities formed by large-scale connections, and expanding the number of users and connecting as many devices and services as possible can enhance the overall value of the platform.

This set of rules is also being replayed in the Web3 field. After more than a decade of development, blockchain technology has gradually integrated into various aspects of ordinary people's lives from small-scale geek experiments, and many public chains have formed rich ecosystems.

In this logic, users and traffic will become the main battleground for the future Web3, and interoperability is undoubtedly a key area of contention, serving as an important breakthrough for the development of the crypto industry. As Sam Sangmin Seo, founder of the Klaytn Foundation, stated, blockchain technology plays a crucial role in metaverse technology because it provides interoperability between different metaverses.

Moreover, a few projects, such as Cosmos, Polkadot, and Cardano, have begun to attempt to provide a certain degree of flexibility, trying to adapt to these differences and establishing interoperability between layer one and layer two protocols from the outset. Recently, the public chain Klaytn reached a cooperation with the cross-chain smart contract platform ZetaChain to promote built-in full-chain interoperability; the interoperability protocol LayerZero launched the AptosBridge cross-chain bridge, and YugaLabs is building an interoperable "Otherside development kit," among others.

2. How Interoperability Will Affect Web3

Interoperability is not a new term; it is a direction that has been attempted at every stage of the internet.

In the past, within the computer field, interoperability referred to the ability of software to communicate with other software to effectively transmit and process information, largely because multiple systems often need to talk to and understand each other. Unfortunately, within the framework of the internet, the only thing we are familiar with that comes close seems to be email, whose greatest success is that a person with a Gmail account can send emails to someone with a completely different TLD account.

In the world of blockchain, interoperability refers to all the ways and technologies we can use that allow blockchains to transmit information, assets, and data to each other, with a richer connotation.

Generally speaking, blockchains cannot monitor or track what happens on other networks. Each chain establishes its own rules, such as protocol design, tokens, programming languages, governance structures, and cultures. Therefore, achieving interaction between blockchains is quite difficult.

It is precisely the existence of these barriers that limits the economic activities of the Web3 ecosystem, as the economic activities of each blockchain network are completely isolated and cannot form synergy and connection, like isolated "continents."

One can imagine that interoperability aims to open new paths to connect these continents, similar to the Age of Exploration, reconnecting Europe's technology, America's agriculture, Africa's labor force, Asia's markets, and Australia's mines, sharing the wealth and creativity of the world through trade, thus creating a new human civilization.

Especially today, while blockchain can provide vast ecosystems, the ability of these ecosystems to interact with each other is very limited. The enhancement of interoperability will bring tremendous value. If we can connect various blockchains, scaling solutions, and application chains, we can leverage the unique advantages of each blockchain ecosystem to achieve greater synergy. For example, with interoperable smart contracts, we can fundamentally change certain fields such as business, law, or healthcare by ensuring that information can be transmitted securely and customizably between private and public chains.

Today, for Web3, the most important step towards widespread acceptance is convenience. Interoperability can ensure that newcomers can enter the field without needing to understand the complexities of blockchain too much. Imagine that although decentralization within a single blockchain network is the primary goal of many blockchain projects today, if we could establish an interoperability system among multiple blockchains, it would be a more advanced form of decentralization and the ultimate goal of the Web3 world.

3. MATCH: Linking Global Users to Web3

In the digital age, traffic equals power, and data equals wealth. However, for a long time, it has been controlled by a few platforms, which not only harms the legitimate rights and interests of a vast number of users but also affects the healthy development of the ecosystem.

Just recently, Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, explicitly stated: "Today, our personal data is occupied by a few large tech platforms like Google and Facebook. These platforms use this data to lock us in, leading to competition for data ownership, where the winner is the platform that controls the most data."

To break this situation, Web3, based on blockchain as the underlying technology, has become an important choice, and interoperability is precisely the key. On one hand, users can traverse various ecosystems at a lower cost, choosing the best experience; on the other hand, developers also hope to create cross-chain/modular applications that maintain a unified global state and liquidity across multiple chain environments.

To meet the growing demand for blockchain interoperability solutions in the ecosystem, many excellent teams are working in this direction, and MATCH Lab is an important player among them, opening new paths with its unique technical approach.

As a traffic platform specifically serving social networks in the Web3 era, MATCH's design concept is to act as a traffic intermediary layer between different blockchain platforms, effectively bringing in traffic from the traditional internet while enabling efficient circulation between different blockchain platforms.

The Working Mechanism of MATCH

To facilitate the smooth flow of traffic between different platforms, MATCH is based on COSMOS's IBC, bridging the EVM system and the MoveVM system to provide traffic services for the ecosystems of the three systems. In addition, MATCH can efficiently support DID, suitable for the private traffic economy in the privacy-focused era.

This design effectively addresses the "island dilemma" of the Web3 world, achieving efficient circulation of value between platforms, enhancing global accessibility and usability, and reducing the inefficient and cumbersome processes for users migrating across different platforms. It also allows good applications to break the limitations of their initial platforms and effectively capture external traffic.

According to industry insiders, after MATCH goes live, it will also provide a wealth of tools for new developers and users, facilitating the redeployment of their application architecture based on MATCH. By simply deploying the traffic layer on the MATCH platform, they can solve the migration between different ecological platforms. In this way, it will directly link different "islands" together, perhaps representing the true new continent of the Web3 world!