What is IBC?
Following the definition from the project website: “IBC is an interoperability protocol for communicating arbitrary data between arbitrary state machines.” What does that mean? It means that IBC was designed to securely process transactions on two chains without need to involve a third party.
What are alternatives?
IBC is a pretty new protocol (designed in 2019), but the problem of establishing transactional communication between blockchain is very common and not new. So how did the world manage to solve interoperability between chains before IBC? The main way developers managed to overcome this problem was bridging the networks. It allowed the exchange of assets (like NFT or ERC-20 based tokens) between networks.
There are at least a few options that exists on the market and try to address this problem:
- Cross-chain bridges
- XCMP - Polkadot version of cross-chain communication
What problems can IBC solve?
More than 1.5M transactions on 25 blockchain networks are executed every month using Inter Blockchain Communication protocol. IBC is an open source interoperability protocol designed by Cosmos for exchanging digital assets (tokens, interchain accounts, oracle data) between chains without the need of third party solutions like dedicated bridges.
