ICON (ICX), South Korea’s most significant public blockchain project ICON ecosystem, released its BTP (Blockchain Transmission Protocol) on March 1. The protocol allows interoperability between individual blockchains, promoting service invocation, value transfer, and data exchange.

🌐 ICON Bridge is coming to the ICON ecosystem

We are happy to announce a cross-chain interoperability product built using the technical foundations of BTP!

Read all about ICON Bridge and its implications in our latest announcement 👇https://t.co/XUTql1B63e

— ICON Foundation 🌐 (@helloiconworld) March 1, 2022

 

Connecting the chains

As blockchain technology has developed, the multitude of fighting networks springing up has mostly been content to confine themselves, seldom seeing at others for inspiration, but unusually fully communicating with one another.  ICON, nevertheless, has always said its mission to “Hyperconnect the World,” and this latest release is a significant step towards that goal.

BTP is an interoperability protocol that provides different stand-alone blockchains to interact and communicate with each other, including those with entirely separate consensus models and algorithms. It also provides for interoperability between public and private blockchains.

Also, read – South Korea Plans To Spend $187 Million On Metaverse Development.

Real-world uses

The killer app for this sort of interoperability is to be capable of transferring tokens between different blockchains. ICON said in a statement: “BTP facilitates such transfer directly through smart contracts, from one chain to another without using a central trading platform, at the protocol level.”

Other potential uses involve the verifying of data, such as a decentralized identity, by cross-chain communication, and the automation of services on one blockchain being triggered from and for the advantage of another.

Let’s get talking

BTP connects networks through message relayers, which are autonomous of the blockchains, and message centers, verifiers, and service handlers, which must be executed on each blockchain through smart contracts. Blockchains which do not aid smart contracts can only partake as a sender, not as a receiver of messages.

While a single implementation of BTP combines two blockchain networks, these networks can also relate to other networks by further BTP implementations, building an interconnected and interoperable web of blockchains. ICON last month revealed its new consensus algorithm, enhancing scalability and bandwidth while maintaining security.

Icon released the BTP bridge in 2020.

$ICX launching #BTP bridge soon. Probably nothing… pic.twitter.com/vRKHXKoEyD

— Crypto Traveler 🌐 (@ICON_nist) March 9, 2022