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TL;DR ZetaChain now supports Solana making it the first public L1 platform to support dApps that natively span all three major chains (Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum) in a general and simple way. Learn more in our at 10am EST Spaces today!

At ZetaChain, our mission is to build a Universal Blockchain with native access to any blockchain, making crypto as accessible, diverse, and connected as the internet. That’s why we’re constantly evaluating new chains and judicially selecting important and heterogeneous blockchains with different characteristics and use cases. Currently, the most important UTXO chain (Bitcoin) and the most popular EVM chains (Ethereum, Base, BSC, Polygon) are supported on ZetaChain. Developers only need to deploy Universal Apps once to gain native access to these chains and ones added in the future. Today, we examine the transformative impact of the ZetaChain-Solana integration on the crypto industry.

Key Takeaways

• Universal Apps: Apps on the Universal EVM can both natively access and be accessed from any connected chain without requiring users to switch networks. Gateway enables contracts on ZetaChain to remotely invoke external contracts.

• Current Solana interoperability: Siloed, with current interoperability solutions relying on token bridges (e.g., LayerZero, Wormhole) that wrap assets between chains. There is no straightforward platform to build dApps that comprehensively integrate Solana with other chains.

• ZetaChain-Solana support live on mainnet: Universal Apps on ZetaChain can now involve native SOL and SPL tokens (standard token interface on Solana) like ERC20s (standard tokens on EVM), and seamlessly compose them with Solana apps, together with native assets/data across Bitcoin, Ethereum, and future supported chain ecosystems such as TON (under development). Get started with ZetaChain’s Solana documentation.

• Universal App examples: Out-of-the-box single EVM contracts that only need to be deployed once to gain access to users and liquidity on other chains e.g. a Curve tri-pool that consists of SOL.SOL/BTC.BTC/USDC.ETH, where users, starting from any one of these three chains, can swap their native SOL/BTC/USDC.ETH for any other native assets (no wrapping tokens).

• Solana user experience: Access Universal Apps without switching from your preferred wallet on Solana. For example, a Solana user can now interact with a Universal App to send USDC to a recipient on Base. A Solana user can buy an NFT on ZetaChain and send it to their account on BNB chain — all in one step.

The need for diverse blockchains

We recognize that one blockchain or one ecosystem of blockchains cannot satisfy all needs. For example, EVM chains share the same development experience and ecosystem of wallets, Ethereum L2s might share security and some interoperability, and Cosmos IBC chains share a consensus mechanism and interoperability. Therefore, heterogeneous chains with different levels of security, cost, latency, throughput, app ecosystems, use cases, and cultures are likely to be the future of the blockchain ecosystem.

Our goal is to bring the most important and long-term viable chains together so that dApp developers have a central place to develop and host their contracts, and users have a fluid and native experience among multiple chains.

Why ZetaChain is targeting Solana

Solana is a key focus among the targeted chains to integrate with ZetaChain. Solana has quickly proven itself to be an important blockchain, occupying an interesting niche—a low latency, high throughput consumer chain geared towards mainstream adoption with demanding use cases like everyday payments and NFTs. Solana has a notable cultural and technical influence from the networking industry and traditional Unix operating system design.

Innovations and Trade-offs of Solana

The hyper-focus on speed brought a lot of innovation to blockchain processing, such as parallel processing transactions, a more efficient blockchain-native virtual machine (Solana Virtual Machine, or SVM), which leverages eBPF as a component, compared to traditional virtual machines like EVM, and a more flexible and performance-oriented low-level programming language in Rust versus bespoke blockchain-only languages like Solidity.

However, Solana made some tradeoffs to achieve these speedups in latency and throughput, primarily in independent auditability so it’s more difficult and costly to verify the correctness of the Solana blockchain compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum. Due to the high data growth in validators and high requirements of hardware, it also poses challenges for decentralizations and independent nodes to verify the history of the blockchain. Although not as decentralized and easy to audit compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum, the advantage is salient—Solana is much faster in both transaction throughput and finality latency and low cost.

For many users and applications, the benefits far out-weight the cost. Example use cases include payments, memecoins, and NFTs, which support high spikes and sustained participants. High speed and low cost are essential to compete with existing web2 and financial infrastructures. Solana has one of the best chances to achieve the necessary speed and cost without the high friction of the modular design of the Ethereum ecosystem (L2s, Etc.) 1.

Current state of Solana interoperability

The Solana blockchain, like most blockchains, is siloed. Most solutions that interoperate Solana with other blockchains are in the form of token bridging supported by custom bridges or bridges built with message passing systems (crosschain contract call system) such as LayerZero and Wormhole.

These bridges usually wraps assets on other chains such as BTC, ETH, Etc. to a wrapped version on Solana, or wrap Solana assets such as SOL on other chains like Ethereum. Solutions like Circle Cross Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) provide on-chain facilities to move USDC across chains. However, there is no place to build a decentralized application that brings Solana together with other chains in a general and simple way.

Native Solana Support for Universal Apps

The latest Gateway upgrade introduces a unified hub and single API to streamline cross-chain interactions for Universal Apps. This includes the ability for a smart contract on ZetaChain to natively control assets on all external chains and remotely invoke external contracts (feature for Solana in development).

Imagine a contract on ZetaChain distributing SOL to an address on Solana and BTC to an address on Bitcoin based on certain conditions. A sample dApp could be a Curve tri-pool that consists of SOL.SOL/BTC.BTC/USDC.ETH, where users, starting from any one of these three chains, can swap their native SOL/BTC/USDC.ETH for any other native assets.

From the users’ perspective, the trade only involves native assets in their wallets on external chains—no wrapped assets. From dApp developers’ point of view, the AMM contract (Curve) deals with the external chain and asset in an abstracted and uniform way, so supporting native SOL.SOL or USDT.SOL requires no additional development effort.

In this case, we’re discussing an AMM (Curve) for native assets on multiple chains, but you could imagine deploying other time-tested EVM-compatible smart contracts such as Uniswap and Aave that natively interoperate with Solana’s vibrant ecosystem together with dApps and users on other external connected chains.

ZetaChain’s approach integrating Solana

There were several challenges in integrating Solana into the ZetaChain blockchain system:

1. Different Interaction Models: Solana’s account model, authentication and permission, and smart contract composition differ from more common EVM chains.

2. Different Transaction Signature Scheme: Solana uses EdDSA, while ZetaChain uses ECDSA, posing challenges for the Threshold Signature Scheme (TSS) used by ZetaChain to control assets and authenticate contract calls on external chains.

Addressing Interaction Model Differences

To address the first challenge, ZetaChain abstracts the differences in interacting with blockchains using the same set of primitives so that Universal Apps don’t have to specialize for different assets/chains. The Universal contract will be called in the same way from Solana as from other chains, and the contract handles native SOL or SPL tokens (standard token interface on Solana) in the same way as other native assets such as Ethereum’s USDC, ETH, BTC, BSC USDC. The ZetaChain system handles the underlying machinery to realize this abstraction of native assets on different chains internally, for example creating accounts for users on Solana if they did not exist.

Overcoming Signature Scheme Challenges

To address the second challenge, the Gateway contract (program) on Solana verifies the ECDSA from the ZetaChain TSS address at the contract level and introduces its own nonce, chain-id, and other commitment schemes to avoid same chain replay, cross-chain replay, and other security measures. The Gateway program is hosted in https://github.com/zeta-chain/protocol-contracts-solana, which includes more information and the source code of the Gateway program.

Conclusion

ZetaChain provides the simplest decentralized platform for building Universal Apps, leveraging the liquidity, ecosystem, users, and developers across all of crypto. With the integration of Solana, developers are able to build Universal Apps on ZetaChain that involve native SOL and SPL tokens, and seamlessly compose with Solana on-chain applications. For the first time, you can build a decentralized application that spans these three major chains in a general and simple way:

• Bitcoin — the most secure, censorship resistant chain

• Ethereum — the highest liquidity DeFi ecosystem chains

• Solana — the fast consumer app chain

The Solana integration is now live on mainnet! Visit the ZetaDocs to learn about building Universal Apps with Solana and start testing in ZetaChain’s DevNet environment.

References:
[1]: https://usa.visa.com/solutions/crypto/deep-dive-on-solana.html

About ZetaChain

ZetaChain is the first Universal Blockchain with native access to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and more, offering seamless user experience and unified liquidity to the next billions of users. With its Universal EVM, ZetaChain empowers developers to build Universal Apps that operate natively across any blockchain, creating a fluid crypto ecosystem from a single platform.

Follow ZetaChain on Twitter @zetablockchain and join the conversation on Discord and Telegram. Reach out to [email protected] if you’re building on top of ZetaChain.

Any projects mentioned are 3rd party, not ZetaChain.