Multichain has fallen, and the cross-chain industry is about to die?

Multichain, the king of the MPC cross-chain bridge field, is about to fall. Where will the cross-chain industry go? Does a secure cross-chain exist? What new consensus will the industry usher in?

Written by: James XYC, MAP Protocol Core Developer, Forbes Web3 Innovation Pioneer, Industry Researcher

First of all, I would like to express my sympathy and sympathy for what happened to Multichain. Multichain, formerly known as Anyswap, started in 2019 and was renamed to the current Multichain in the middle. At the beginning when its interface was very rough, I tested it and bought its coins, but it was cut as a leek, and it fell to the residual value and was thrown away.

In 2019, MAP Protocol also began to develop. It may be because we are timid, or it may be because we have read too much about cryptography and Satoshi Nakamoto has too much faith. At that time, the team actually had an MPC version of the bridge, and we did not launch it. It has been concentrating on the research and development of the light client technology defined by Satoshi Nakamoto to develop an interoperability solution that removes privileged roles and crosses all types of blockchains.

Before talking about AnySwap, let’s talk about the history of the industry

From 2015 to 2020, many tokens were issued on Ethereum, but the listing fees of hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of Hong Kong dollars on centralized exchanges are not affordable for many token issuers. After the popularity of defi in 2020, the industry has another application in addition to currency issuance: coin trading. There is no listing fee for defi, well, the problem is solved.

At that time, the gas fee for transactions on Ethereum was too high, so a batch of emerging public chains came out, all of which had DeFi. This encounters the problem of cross-chain.

Although Cosmos and Polkadot conform to the Nakamoto consensus, they are unprivileged role cross-chain. But their technical route is to only cross the internal isomorphic chain of the ecology, and mainstream and popular blockchains cannot cover it.

**How to solve this problem, go forward or go back and use a centralized solution? **

At that time, MAP Protocol was developing an unprivileged role based on the Nakamoto consensus, covering all types of blockchains, including EVM and Cosmos. It still followed the decentralized ledger alignment in the Nakamoto consensus, but it had to cover all types of chains.

At this time, Anyswap uses MPC internal multi-signature to do cross-chain fund custody, cross-chain message transmission, and cross-chain legality determination. MPC multi-signature integrates three roles into one, and opens up all types of blockchains at once . However, this technical solution appeared in 2016, and wanchain did it. But at that time, the industry environment was honest and more technology-oriented, and Wanchain said that it was centralized. Look at Later LayerZero but directly said that he does not need to be trusted. Of course, AnySwap has no false propaganda, and they have never said that they are trustless, so they are a respectable industry party.

Clearly, centralized off-chain consensus development can be as fast as the Internet. Soon, Multichain's peak TVL will be $10 billion. With it came more than 500 copycats, almost all of which were funded. And today, because of coin theft incidents (self-stealing, or hackers?) Almost all disappeared. The most notable follower is LayerZero, which technically adds an Oracle supervisory role to MPC (Oracle is easily attacked, just like finding a three-year-old child to supervise an adult), but they say that they do not need to trust Yes, it turned out that the capital was defrauded of more than 100 million US dollars, but this is not the capital's fault. After all, it was normal for the capital company to enter the market in a hurry and no one understood cryptography.

**It can be said that without AnySwap, there would be no LayerZero. Now that AnySwap has fallen, what will LayerZero do next? We will wait and see. **

As the king of the MPC cross-chain bridge field, the development of Multichain has naturally been very stable, and they have done Swap several times with their boss, and have been working hard on development. Later, I heard that their TVL fund custody pool was stolen a lot, and they kept it under pressure. Later, I heard that MC was acquired by a giant company, and the Indian became the boss. Also just rumors. Until yesterday, it was reported that a multi-signature wallet of 1.5 billion US dollars was controlled by the police.

inner feelings

From the bottom of my heart, I actually don't like Multichain very much, because it leads the industry in a wrong direction, a direction that is centralized but unregulated. Moreover, the centralized bridge model led by Multichain has caused the outside world to think of insecurity when it comes to cross-chain.

In the past four years, we have been concentrating on the research and development of MAP Protocol. Many centralized bridges represented by Multichain have entered the market value of billions of dollars in large exchanges. Everyone is human. Do you think we can not be sour? Adhering to the inner reverence for technology, our own internal MPC bridge code has been thrown into the trash can and has not been pushed. This also makes us very difficult, and we have been ridiculed all the time. My friends often laugh at me and say that people in the currency circle are all for making money, and you are really doing charity. I remember one meeting, a technical backbone flew from across the country to the meeting, and when he talked about a big man in the depths, he almost cried and said that if we pushed MPC earlier, it would not be as difficult as it is now.

Is it safe to cross-chain?

Cross-chain can be safe, different databases can be connected safely, why not different ledgers? The Cosmos based on the Nakamoto consensus has been running stably for many years, with tens of billions of dollars in assets, and there have been no accidents. ** To see whether the cross-chain is safe or not, the key is to use the Nakamoto consensus, or use the MPC and Oracle consensus outside the chain. **

No one is willing to do research and development involving the Nakamoto consensus. It takes too long and involves too many technical modules. Cosmos took five years to develop, and Polkadot also took more than five years. The industry is very impetuous. But fortunately, we spent four years in vain, and finally came up with the MAP Protocol, which has only been online for a few months. But positioning is an infrastructure, not a bridge. Solving the problem that Cosmos and Polkadot can only cross ecological isomorphic chains, MAP Protocol can cross any type of blockchain. And there is only MAP in the world.

MPC cross-chain solutions are all "being" left, will there be a bridge available in the future?

Yes, MAP Protocol has a full-chain aggregation swap for Butter, which has been launched. This is a cross-chain verification based on the Satoshi Nakamoto consensus, not MPC. Of course, once it is decentralized, it will not have such a wide coverage chain as the centralized one. However, the product is still different from the bridge. The bridge generally spans U, and users have to continue to operate by themselves. Butter allows users to directly exchange any currency of the target chain with any currency.

What does the future look like?

The future is cruel. If this industry is not in awe of technology and finance, it will only have a beginning and no end. Last night, some people in the community said that it seems that MAP Protocol can win by lying down. Technical progress is respected, not short-term market catering. I think this is my greatest comfort.

In a bigger future, the cross-chain interoperability protocol is the tcp/ip protocol in the Internet field, and the MAP protocol is evolving in this direction.