It's not clear what the merits of other "interoperability" projects are at a fundamental level.

Let's look at Cosmos IBC.

Step 1: wait for a state change to reach finality on some chain (e.g. BTC)

Step 2: build a Cosmos Hub
           --> complex; large attack surface
           --> why do you need a blockchain at all for this?

Step 3: get the Hub to reach finality about the event that's already reached finality on the Bitcoin blockchain
           --> redundant; wasteful

Step 4: launch a token to coax the Hub's validators to behave nicely and not do horrible things with the BTC
            --> an entire subsystem of complexity-risk and cryptonomic risk

Step 5: pick out a smallish list of validators to look after your chain (because DPoS/Tendermint doesn't scale to many validators)
            --> wait, there's now an inside group controlling the tokenisation of BTC!
            --> this inside group gets to decide what's true/real for the interchain
            --> the Bitcoin blockchain loses sovereignty over the existence of tokenised BTC

Step 6: tokenise BTC on another chain via the mediation of the Hub
            --> but wait, this has just placed a kind of intermediary into the interchain.
            --> at the interchain level, this is centralized
            --> it's the same sort of play that traditional business is used to: insert yourself into a value chain, engage in rent-seeking, extract value.
            --> why are we centralizing?



Why does this go wrong?
The decentralized internet needs an open protocol that's as chain-agnostic as TCP/IP is site-agnostic. Otherwise there will literally be no true "internet of blockchains."


Let me spell out how important this is:
Imagine your website was fundamentally less privileged than Facebook's, and in order to reach your site, traffic would have to go through Facebook.com. What would happen?
What would happen is another VHS-Betamax turf war.
We wouldn't have gotten an internet at all We'd just watch a fight between centralizing players.
If the protocols privilege one party over others, then people build competing protocols instead of building a far more valuable ecosystem upon one protocol.


Without open, unopinionated protocols, there would be no internet, there'd just be a turf war.


This might happen to the decentralized internet if the approach of Cosmos and Polkadot starts to fly.


So what do we do instead?
XRouter is an unopinionated, open protocol for the interchain.

It doesn't force value or traffic through some middle chain.
It doesn't privilege a middle chain's finality over that of the chains it connects with.
It doesn't have the complexity or risk of a Hub, its token, and its governance system.
It doesn't put an unscalable set of validators in charge.
It doesn't rob blockchains of their sovereignty over their coins when they're tokenised.


Time to build: https://api.blocknet.co/#xrouter