Wanchain today released Wanchain 3.0, making it the world’s most advanced blockchain interoperability platform. This product release features cross-chain transaction capability through Wanchain for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and ERC20 tokens such as MakerDAO’s DAI and MKR. This launch marks a monumental step in the industry’s progression toward the Web 3.0 economy where all public and private blockchains will be completely interconnected. Similar to how Wide Area Networks (WAN) connected the many siloed Local Area Networks of the early days of the internet, Wanchain is a platform dedicated to connecting the countless disparate blockchains to enable decentralized transfer of value between the networks.

What is Wanchain?

The Path to Decentralized Finance

Those in the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry are all on a collective mission to rethink and reshape the way the world is structured. As technology has progressed throughout the decades, each advancement has, intentionally or unintentionally, led to an increasing consolidation of power and wealth among the world’s largest institutions and enterprises. Through the advent of blockchain and smart contracts, we are witnessing the first technological advancement to begin moving humanity away from centralization, distributing the wealth, power, and trust back in the hands of the people. The transition from centralized finance to decentralized finance has required a bit of a middle ground, leading us to the current crypto industry where centralized exchanges are still dominating trading volume. However, all signs points to an increasingly decentralized future in blockchain finance. Even Binance, the world’s highest volume centralized exchange, has announced it will launch a decentralized exchange (DEX) in the near future. But, creating a DEX siloed to one blockchain is just like creating a new email service on a LAN network — it does not address the underlying issue. Until all applications, DEXs, protocols, and other crypto components are fully interoperable across blockchains, our collective vision will not be achieved. This is where Wanchain comes in.

Jack Lu — Wanchain Founder & CEO

“Wanchain 3.0 is our biggest release ever, bringing the network of Bitcoin users to projects and tokens built on Ethereum. I am very proud of our team for achieving our final 2018 milestone laid out in the initial launch of our company,” said Jack Lu, Wanchain’s Founder and CEO. “Wanchain continues to be laser-focused on the long term where we see our platform being one of the fundamental components linking all digital assets in a decentralized, trustless and permissionless manner.”

Wanchain — The World’s Most Advanced Blockchain Interoperability Platform

Wanchain began with the launch of version 1.0 in January 2018 for the native Wanchain platform, then launched 2.0 interoperability with Ethereum this summer. Today, Wanchain released version 3.0, connecting the industry’s two most powerful blockchain networks and communities together. The launch also includes several ERC20 token integrations which will be announced over the coming weeks. Wanchain achieved this monumental advancement through its cross-chain mechanism and secure multi-party computation. An example Bitcoin-to-Ethereum cross-chain trade is enabled by Wanchain through locking the native tokens on the respective chains with smart contracts and Storeman nodes, creating a proxy token on Wanchain (e.g. Wanchain-ETH), then releasing the smart contracts for redemption of the coins on the original chain.

Wanchain has also recently created a package for developers to make the cross-chain transaction process more seamless. This package, called WanX (Github), can be leveraged by developers looking to make a cross-chain transaction on Wanchain and can also be used to drastically increase efficiency of creating cross-chain applications. See the following video for an example DEX built on our testnet using this cross-chain functionality:

In addition to our work with public blockchains, Wanchain is also making progress in interoperability in the enterprise world. In September, we joined The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. Hyperledger is a global collaboration, hosted by The Linux Foundation, including leaders in finance, banking, IoT, supply chain, manufacturing and technology. Wanchain’s team has initiated collaboration with the Hyperledger Quilt community for interoperability, as well as Hyperledger Indy for Identity. Additionally, Wanchain joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) in August, the industry’s first global standards organization to deliver an open, standards-based architecture and specification to accelerate the adoption of Enterprise Ethereum. Wanchain is taking steps to make significant contributions to the public blockchain specifications and interoperability specifications.

Enabling the Next Wave of Use Cases

Decentralized exchanges leveraging Wanchain’s cross-chain (Ethereum-based) or built directly on Wanchain will now be able to offer Bitcoin trading pairs. New pairs on decentralized exchanges with BTC will allow for drastic increases in liquidity for the space at large. Other use cases for this cross-chain capability could include cross-chain crypto loans, crypto payments leveraging multiple chains, and any other use case for bringing Bitcoin to applications currently siloed to Ethereum. The opportunities cross-chain with Bitcoin will bring for Wanchain and the industry are quite exciting.

Wanchain’s Vision

We believe the future will be decentralized. Built by all of us, owned by all of us. Wanchain’s vision is to connect and enable communities through our technology. We are excited to spend the foreseeable future building the future of finance and making our contribution to enable a more inclusive, distributed economy that relies on math instead of brands, governments, or institutions for trust. We will continue to stay heads down focused on building out more integrations with blockchains, additional integrations to grow our ecosystem, enhancing our Wanchain developer experience, and growing the number of use cases utilizing our cross-chain functionality.

Press Inquiries and Interview Requests

Dan Reecer — dan@wanchain.org

About Wanchain

Wanchain is a blockchain platform that enables decentralized transfer of value between blockchains. The Wanchain infrastructure enables the creation of distributed financial applications for individuals and organizations. Wanchain currently enables cross-chain transactions with Ethereum, and today’s product launch will enable the same functionalities with Bitcoin. Going forward, we will continue to bridge blockchains and bring cross-chain finance functionality to companies in the industry. Wanchain has employees globally with offices in Beijing (China), Austin (USA), and London (UK).

You can find more information about Wanchain on our website. Additionally, you can reach us through Telegram, Discord, Medium, Twitter, and Reddit. You can also sign up for our monthly email newsletter here.