📄️ Why Polymer
The blockchain space is moving towards an ever growing number of execution shards appearing. L1s, alt-L1s, rollups, app chains and app rollups all fall under this category. Modular blockchains also further complicate the landscape by massively opening up the design space for blockchains.
📄️ IBC Expansion
The traditional IBC setup works when both chains are Cosmos chains (or any other chain that has a native IBC implementation), but what if we want to introduce another chain that does not have a native IBC implementation available?
📄️ Multi-hop IBC
Ultimately Polymer will place itself as an IBC router hub in between two chains wanting to connect over IBC. For this, it relies on the multi-hop IBC specification that ensures that chains can send packets over IBC between one another despite them not having a direct IBC connection, instead leveraging multiple hops where IBC connections do already exist.
📄️ Virtual IBC
In the previous step we added Polymer as a hub in between two Cosmos chains. Now let’s replace one of the chains with a chain that is not natively compatible with IBC, like Ethereum.
📄️ zkMint
The Polymer chain, through its consensus engine zkMint, will generate a header with signatures optimized for an off-chain zero-knowledge (ZK) circuit and verification in the EVM . An off-chain ZK prover will produce a zero-knowledge-proof (ZKP) of (Polymer’s) consensus that is verified on Ethereum (virtual chain) by the verifier contract, providing a significant reduction in gas cost.
📄️ Native & virtual clients
Making consensus ZK-friendly and flexible via the zkMint consensus engine ensures efficient and cost-effective verification of Tendermint consensus on the virtual chains. This solves one of the issues of integrating IBC into non-natively compatible chains.
📄️ Wrap-up
The different concepts of the Polymer protocol, combine together to accelerate IBC expansion to chains or ecosystems that do not have native IBC implementations. In turn, we believe that this will lead to IBC and the Polymer Hub to become the backbone of blockchain interoperability.