Omni Network, which raised $18 million, how does it provide interoperability across Rollups?

Written by: Frank, Foresight News

The Ethereum interoperability protocol Omni Network today officially announced its $18 million funding completed in 2022, with investments from Pantera Capital, Two Sigma Ventures, Jump Crypto, Hashed, The Spartan Group, and others.

As a cross-Rollup interoperability protocol built on the Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer, Foresight News briefly introduces the basic situation of Omni Network today, as well as how it achieves cross-Rollup interoperability design secured by Ethereum.

What is Omni Network?

Omni Network believes that the Rollup solutions in the current Ethereum Layer 2 track have addressed Ethereum's scalability issues, but interactions between different Rollups are not possible, leading to liquidity being fragmented across different L2 networks, which not only greatly diminishes user experience but also makes Ethereum more fragmented than ever.

Therefore, Omni Network positions itself as the "Ethereum interoperability infrastructure," aiming to provide interoperability for Rollup networks such as Optimism, Arbitrum, zkSync, and Starkware, becoming the core infrastructure for all Rollup networks and modular applications on Ethereum, achieving a seamless and secure cross-Rollup user experience.

Omni Network co-founder Tyler Tarsi has stated that it combines the Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer and the testing components of Cosmos SDK to balance Ethereum's security with Cosmos's speed and programmability.

Omni Network's solution is to enable fast and low-cost cross-Rollup communication between L2 networks, making it easier for users to interact across different networks:

When developers build applications based on Omni Network, they are not limited to a single Rollup but can seamlessly deploy across different execution environments;

When users transact on protocols integrated with Omni, Omni validators are responsible for transferring messages from one Rollup to another, allowing users to access all crypto assets distributed across different networks simultaneously;

Additionally, the development team behind Omni Network is the blockchain development company Recursive (Rift). Recursive co-founder Austin King previously founded the crypto payment project Strata Labs, which was acquired by Ripple's investment arm Xpring in 2019.

Security Provided by Ethereum

Interoperability often means fragile security; to date, nearly half of all funds stolen by DeFi hackers have come from interoperability protocols (over $2.5 billion).

Moreover, Omni Network provides infrastructure through the Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer, which meets interoperability needs while still obtaining security from Ethereum itself:

Using the restakers architecture of ETH to ensure rapid settlement of Rollups, developers can build applications that access state, transactions, users, and crypto assets from all Rollups by layering on a programmable/stateful layer compatible with EVM.

Omni Network's validators also run Ethereum nodes and integrated Rollup nodes simultaneously.

Programmable Interoperability Layer

Compared to applications deployed on different networks that lead to isolation from each other, Omni Network's programmable interoperability will provide economically advantageous cross-Rollup applications through attributes such as multi-Rollup liquidity aggregation.

By building a programmable interoperability layer, Omni will empower developers to create applications that are globally applicable by default, without further complicating the operations for developers.

At the same time, Omni Network ultimately hopes to enable use cases such as multi-Rollup stablecoins and other DeFi primitives to aggregate liquidity from different L2 Rollup networks.

Project Roadmap

Recursive will launch the Omni Network public testnet in the third quarter of 2023 and plans to release the first version of the mainnet in 2024 in collaboration with major Rollup partners such as Arbitrum, Polygon zkEVM, Scroll, ConsenSys's Linea, and Starkware.

Subsequent updates from Omni Network will include how to obtain security for interoperability from Ethereum, how programmable interoperability will facilitate new types of applications, and the technical development progress of core Rollup partners.