Blockchain technology has inarguably become one of the most promising innovations in our society. Imagine, embedding contracts in digital code and storing in transparent, shared databases, where they are protected from deletion, revision and tampering. Every payment, every process, every task and every agreement would have a digital signature and record that could be identified, validated, shared and stored. As such, intermediaries like lawyers, brokers, and bankers might no longer be obligatory. Organizations, individuals, algorithms and machines would freely transact and interact with one another with little friction. Blockchain has the potential to bring innovation for our social and economic systems. Nonetheless, while the impact will be tremendous, many technological barriers have to be overcome.

Notably, the gross amount of people fail to identify the real problem of achieving internet-scale decentralised applications. Approximately 8/10 think off scalability as the biggest issue for mass adoption, and seem to have created a fetish-like obsession for the transactions per second (TPS) achieved by one blockchain. Scalability has had a lot of attention in the past year, and projects like the lightning network, plasma, raiden and sharding are some usefull solutions to this problem. Solving scalability issues is around the corner, and focus should be shifted to other technological barriers.

Nowadays, one takes it for granted that packages ordered in China are delivered to our doorstep in Europe or the US. The company delivers the package to a shipping company, who transports the packages by car, plane or ship to the country of destination. Subsequently, the packages are delivered to our doorstep by a local provider of postal services. The coordination accross systems is effortless, unleashing value creation. Due to the standardisation of this process, we can serve more markets more effectively. The same applies to blockchain technology. Interoperability between chains drives value and moreover frees up capital. It enables trust-free transactions across different blockchains and in addition makes the whole system more resistant against attacks. Therefore, Interoperability is critical to how we see the world in 5–10 years

“Interoperability is critical to how we see the world in 5–10 years”

Currently, if we want to move between chains we have to sell our coins on exchanges or in some cases we can use cross-chain atomic swaps. In the past year more and more projects popped up trying to solve interoperability issues. Aion, Wanchain, Polkadot, Cosmos, Arcblock, Oneledger and Icon to name a few. The amount of new platforms for decentralised applications is growing extensively. Chosing the platform that fits the requirements of your dapp might become difficult as each platform has their own pros and cons. Interoperability between chains enables flexibility for developers, allowing them to choose a set of blockchains best suited for its needs. Nonetheless, the projects mentioned above have in common that dapps will still be dependent on their distributed ledger of choice and their consensus mechanism. Moreover, it is not possible to develop applications running for example partially on ethereum and partially on hyperledger. Developing dapps partially on different ledgers would add a new dimension in decentralisation.

Quant Network (https://www.quant.network/ ) is trying to solve interoperability issues in new and innovative manner. They are not creating their own blockchain, but with the overledger operating system they are creating an internet-scale ecosystem. The goal is to build a platform infrastructure on which multi-chain decentralised applications (MApps) can be build, and on which multi-chain smart contracts (Treaty Contracts) can run. This uniqueness for digital ledger environments is achieved by the decoupling of the transaction layer with a shared messaging layer. Hence, your general-purpose applications can sit on non-identical ledgers at the same time, with the ability to communicate with each other. Indeed, applications built on Overledger can communicate, exchange information and value, and migrate, regardless of the ledgers on which they have been deployed.

The Overledger Operating System will facilitate the development of more robust, flexible, dynamic and powerful hyper-decentralised applications. As a result it will bring us closer to mainstream use cases and adoption.

This was a very concise description. You can discover more of their awesomeness on their website https://www.quant.network/ .