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Today we are thrilled to announce our most substantial testnet upgrade to date, bringing us that much closer to launching the first public L1 blockchain with built-in omnichain interoperability. This powerful network upgrade (called Athens 2) introduces the first-ever Omnichain Smart Contracts support. It makes ZetaChain the only public blockchain with smart contracts that can access and manage assets, data, and liquidity on any chain. In this post, we review key takeaways about the upgrade and what it means for web3 developers and users. For more information, check out our updated developer documentation.

Omnichain Smart Contracts

With Omnichain Smart Contracts, developers are now able to write and deploy EVM-compatible smart contracts on ZetaChain that have access to ZetaChain’s universal connectivity. This means developers can leverage the existing robust Ethereum smart contract ecosystem to build truly interoperable applications on top of ZetaChain — as if everything were on a single chain. Omnichain Smart Contracts enable a new paradigm of application building as ZetaChain easily manages and orchestrates native assets on all connected chains in a single place.

ZetaEVM (zEVM) and the ZRC-20 Standard

ZetaEVM (zEVM) is a module on top of the ZetaChain network that allows users to create and deploy EVM-compatible Omnichain Smart Contracts, which can read, write, or manage data and liquidity on any connected chain from a single place. We also introduce a new standard called ZRC-20, which enables these Omnichain Smart Contracts to manage native assets on connected chains. With ZRC-20, developers can build applications that use and transact native fungible tokens such as Bitcoin, ERC-20s, and Gas Assets, all on a single chain.

Bitcoin Smart Contracts

One trailblazing advancement made possible by Omnichain Smart Contracts and ZRC-20 is the ability for developers to deploy contracts on ZetaChain that control Bitcoin natively. In other words, ZetaChain gives Bitcoin, a largely untapped ecosystem, smart contract capabilities. These smart contracts orchestrate not only Bitcoin, but also Bitcoin together with assets and data from other chains. So users can now trade and use Bitcoin with any assets in the DeFi world without wrapping, thereby avoiding the risk of bridge/vault hacks. We expect this feature to boost growth in DeFi by orders of magnitude.

What does this mean for developers and users?

One Contract For All Chains:

Omnichain Smart Contracts significantly lower omnichain development overhead and have a simpler security profile compared to pure messaging. With messaging, developers must deploy individual contracts to every single chain and handle timing and race conditions, which result in substantially more attack surface and development time. With Omnichain Smart Contracts, developers can deploy a single contract that manages assets everywhere. This allows for less code (less smart contract attack surface), fewer deployments (less operational security attack surface and fragmentation), stronger transaction atomicity, and a central place to manage the state of omnichain applications.

Less Fees:

Users experience reduced gas fees because the single contract you use for transactions manages multiple native tokens. Complex logic in contracts on ZetaChain will orchestrate assets across all connected external chains through simple transfers, which minimizes total gas expenditure and slippage. On the other hand, messaging requires substantially more gas on external chains because verification and parsing of data happens on both inbound and outbound. With ZRC-20, inbound and outbound transactions on external chains are simple transfers which use minimal gas (like doing a simple Send to another address in your wallet). All real logic occurs in ZetaChain where fees are bundled for users in a single step.

Better, Safer User Experience:

Elevated volatility, slippage, and additional security risk are common pitfalls of messaging and asynchronous cross-chain development due to added timing and complexity. Instead of waiting for different messages to pass and sync between separate chains via messages, ZetaChain’s Omnichain Smart Contracts enable atomic transaction logic. Outputs like the amount received for a trade, the transfer of an asset from one address to another, etc. are immediately settled on chain as if everything were on a single chain. The result for users is lower slippage/volatility, stronger transaction guarantees, reduced attack surface, and faster completion with single-step transactions (and fees).

Start Testing and Building

We welcome users to test how Bitcoin Support, ZRC-20, and Omnichain Smart Contracts work together in ZetaLabs here. For developers, come start building on ZetaChain using our updated developer documentation.

About ZetaChain

ZetaChain is the foundational layer to a multichain future. The novel blockchain enables multichain functionality without using bridges or wrapped tokens and the easy deployment of omnichain-dApps, or odApps. These applications can manage and connect data and value across all smart contract platforms as well as non-smart contract platforms like Bitcoin and Dogecoin.

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