ZetaChain's Omnichain Toolkit
ZetaChain offers a complete toolkit for developers to build omnichain applications using omnichain smart contracts and/or cross-chain messaging. Here is an overview of these two features and their use cases. For a deeper dive into the different use cases, check out Smart Contracts vs. Messaging.
Omnichain Smart Contracts
Omnichain Smart Contracts are contracts deployed on ZetaChain that can use and orchestrate assets on connected chains, as well as on ZetaChain. With Omnichain Smart Contracts, you are able to have a single place of logic that can maintain the state of assets and data across all connected chains.
Omnichain Smart Contracts are ideal for more complex applications where state management between different chains is core to the application. Some use case examples include:
- Complex trading or DeFi applications that involve liquidity on multiple chains.
- Adding smart contract layer to non-smart-contract chains like Bitcoin and Dogecoin, or incorporating these chains/assets with other pieces of the DeFi ecosystem natively.
- Multichain smart-contract wallet applications like portfolio management across all chains.
- Leveraging existing implementations of protocols like Aave, Uniswap, Curve, etc. for omnichain. Since zEVM is EVM-compatible, one can build on top of these implementations (just as they would on Ethereum) to adapt them for omnichain interoperability.
Cross-Chain Messaging
Cross-chain messaging lets you send messages from any connected chain to any connected chain, including ZetaChain. Cross-chain messaging makes the most sense for applications that generally need minimal logic or state to maintain across all chains, and where data that needs only to be passed between different chains one way.
A good example of this is an application that needs only to call a contract or send value to an address on a different chain. After the message is received and processed on the destination, the application ideally doesn't have to broadcast anything back to synchronize state for anything, and the sender doesn't care about the results.
Cross-chain messaging works to build a variety of applications and primitives such as:
- Omnichain NFTs that can be sent between different chains, and that don't need to know about the state of the collection on other chains
- “Simple” swap or bridge apps that use liquidity pools on existing chains
- Proving ownership of NFTs or simple action-calls to a different chain