Understand Omnichain Token in one article: One coin dominates the world, the new token standard in the era of integration of thousands of chains

Original text: "Omnichain Token: A new token standard in the era of integration of all chains"
If you have frequently participated in DeFi projects in the past two years, you must have been confused by the similar assets under different names in many public chains. For example, why is USDC in Avalanche divided into two versions: USDC and USDC.e? What are the essential differences between various cross-chain ETHs such as ceETH, ETH.grv, soETH and other different standards?
Indeed, with the rise of various new public chain platforms in this cycle, asset cross-chain has suddenly become a rigid demand for all currency users. With the gradual increase of cross-chain assets, the inconsistent standards of cross-chain assets, fragmented liquidity, and various subsequent security issues have also brought considerable obstacles to the first batch of users who experience cross-chain assets. or even asset losses.
So what is the reason for this phenomenon? Now that multi-chain development has become an inevitable trend in the industry, is there a better way to solve users' pain points when cross-chain and provide more useful cross-chain services?
 The underlying flaws of traditional asset cross-chain bridges
In fact, the underlying reason for the above problems lies in the asset cross-chain bridge that we often use now. As its name suggests, the only function of the asset cross-chain bridge is to help users realize cross-chain transfer of assets. However, these so-called "transfers" do not actually help users transfer assets. Instead, they use a "locked casting" model to recast a mapping token of the original asset on the transfer chain.
In short, for the same target chain, the Ethereum transferred by users through cross-chain bridge A will be called AETH, and the Ethereum transferred through cross-chain bridge B will be called BETH. The two assets have different names and different security, so there is no way to exchange them at equal value. This is the underlying reason for the confusion in cross-chain asset standards and the fragmentation of liquidity. In addition, each locking and casting process increases the size of the locked-end fund pool, which also provides opportunities for hackers, which has also indirectly caused the frequent cross-chain bridge security incidents in recent years.
If you want to completely solve the above problems, you need to rely on improvements at the underlying protocol level. This is also the information cross-chain, or protocol layer cross-chain, that has been frequently mentioned recently.
 LayerZero: a protocol layer product that realizes cross-chain information
On the track of information cross-chain, the first one to be deployed and has achieved obvious results is LayerZero, which is now well-known by the majority of users.
Simply put, LayerZero implements information verification between various public chains by deploying "ultra-light nodes" on various mainstream public chains. This verification method and the verification method of the more well-known IBC protocol in the industry both deploy nodes locally on the public chain to independently verify transactions on the external chain. Therefore, compared with other cross-chain solutions, ultra-light nodes are used LayerZero's security is more guaranteed and more trustworthy.
In addition, the LayerZero cross-chain protocol also introduces an oracle to supervise the Relayer responsible for delivering messages (the current partner is mainly Chainlink, the most well-known and safest in the industry). Theoretically, as long as the Relayer and the oracle do not do evil at the same time, there will be no security issues with LayerZero.
Through the innovation of these protocol layer technologies, LayerZero provides a safe and convenient underlying cross-chain protocol, which is fundamentally different from traditional cross-chain bridge solutions. Previously, we mentioned in the article "LayerZero: Often Misunderstood as a Cross-Chain Bridge" The essential difference between LayerZero and cross-chain bridges is also discussed in detail in "Protocol Layer Products https://www.theblockbeats.info/news/32081".
 Omnichain: an all-in-one solution based on LayerZero
After LayerZero successfully solved the problem of underlying cross-chain information transmission, the cross-chain problems that once caused many troubles to users in terms of user experience and asset security have been basically solved.
Multi-chain applications built based on LayerZero can separate the underlying multi-chain architecture from the unified products of the application layer, so that end users can no longer consider the complex differences between different public chains and only need to view the entire blockchain ecosystem. for a complete whole. This ultimate public chain form, which has been abstracted by LayerZero and finally integrated into one, is what we call Omnichain.
On Omnichain, users will no longer see different asset encapsulation formats due to different cross-chain bridges. All assets in the public chain can be regarded as native assets and share the security provided by the underlying LayerZero. Therefore, in the Omnichain ecosystem, the assets held by users will be more unified and secure, and will also have composability that is extremely important for blockchain products.
Since this type of asset standard has exceeded the asset formats that we are used to such as ERC-20 (Ethereum), BRC-20 (BSC) or SPL (Solana) that are limited to a single public chain, it is necessary for us to re- name.
The assets on Omnichain can be divided into two categories: Omnichain-FT (OFT) and Omnichain-NFT (ONFT) based on whether the Token is homogeneous.
 Application scenarios of Omnichain Token
The above article has popularized too much basic knowledge, but in fact, what ordinary readers are most concerned about is what different application methods the new Omnichain Token standard will bring us.
Below we will briefly introduce several typical application cases that combine the Omnichain standard.
（1）BTC.b（Omnichain-FT）
For many readers, the asset name BTC.b may be unfamiliar. Indeed, the original BTC.b was just a Bitcoin cross-chain asset issued on Avalanche. If you are not a core user of Avalanche, you really have little chance of hearing about it. Therefore, in terms of market popularity alone, BTC.b is much inferior to WBTC in Ethereum.
As BTC.b officially cooperates with LayerZero and becomes an OFT that can freely cross chains, BTC.b directly gains the ability to securely transfer between Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Aptos, and any other blockchains that LayerZero will support in the future. .
From then on, BTC.b on each chain no longer has naturally divided liquidity. No matter which chain users use BTC.b on, they do not need to change the way they interact with the asset. At the same time, it will also be more conducive to other cross-chain dApps to integrate BTC.b using OFT standards.
What’s more worth emphasizing is that the integration process of BTC.b into LayerZero is very simple. Since the project party does not need to solve cross-chain technical problems by itself, it only needs to update and be compatible with LayerZero's cross-chain standard. Therefore, transforming BTC.b from the traditional Token format to OFT only requires the use of two 10 or so lines of code. document.
At the same time, the new OFT version BTC.b can retain the original contract address to avoid confusion among users due to different addresses on multiple chains.
（2）PancakeSwap
The OFT version of BTC.b mentioned above only helps a single asset achieve full-chain deployment, but in fact, the OFT standard can also support more complex DeFi project tokens, helping them realize multi-chain deployment while integrating different public chains. Ecology, the most famous of which is PancakeSwap.
In December last year, PancakeSwap’s native token CAKE became an OFT token natively deployed on multiple chains by integrating LayerZero. With the support of LayerZero's underlying layer for many public chains, PancakeSwap took the lead in completing the integration with the popular new public chain Aptos and launched Aptos PancakeBridge.
It is worth mentioning that the combination with non-EVM standard Aptos reflects LayerZero’s stronger cross-chain integration capabilities. It can not only natively support cross-chain information communication of each EVM-compatible public chain, but also integrate non-EVM into a unified Multi-chain system.
Through this new Aptos bridging tool, PancakeSwap successfully listed asset trading pairs containing CAKE on Aptos. Moreover, liquidity mining activities on the Aptos version of PancakeSwap have already started. It can be found that the current Aptos version of PancakeSwap has no difference in performance from the natively deployed local DeFi protocol, and the technical support behind it is LayerZero’s native cross-chain standard OFT.
（3）Lil Pudgys（Omnichain-NFT）
In addition to helping homogeneous tokens complete the transformation of multi-chain deployment, LayerZero can also help NFT complete native cross-chain integration.
We know that in the past 21 years of the NFT bull market, because the Ethereum ecosystem has the strongest consensus and has gathered the most liquidity and excellent infrastructure, many well-known NFT projects are basically concentrated in the Ethereum ecosystem. The NFT projects in the new public chain not only lack liquidity and community support, but also maintain a relatively disconnected relationship with the NFT ecosystem of Ethereum.
For the new batch of users entering the market, Ethereum's high gas fees have seriously raised the threshold for new users, making it much more difficult for them to access mainstream NFT projects.
Therefore, many Ethereum-native NFT projects have created a huge demand for NFT cross-chain in order to better reach Web3 users. However, the traditional cross-chain bridge using locked casting mode is difficult to provide a good user experience for cross-chain NFTs. NFT assets formed across chains in this way are not only difficult to unify with the Ethereum ecosystem in terms of price and liquidity, but will also face many difficulties in further integration in the future.
Among them, Lil Pudgys is a well-known Ethereum NFT project that suffers from imperfect cross-chain infrastructure. In order to make the product reach as many Web3 users as possible, the Lil Pudgys team has also been evaluating various NFT cross-chain solutions. The Omnichain-NFT solution provided by LayerZero perfectly meets the needs of Lil Pudgys’ team.
By integrating the Omnichain-NFT standard, Lil Pudgys has become a multi-chain native NFT product and currently supports mainstream public chains such as Polygon, BNB Smart Chain and Arbitrum. The Lil Pudgys users get in the new public chain are not essentially different from those in Ethereum, and the speed of cross-chain transfers is also greatly improved.
It can be clearly seen from the above cases that the emergence of LayerZero does not just provide users with another choice in the already fiercely competitive cross-chain bridge market, but also attempts to fundamentally solve the current cross-chain bridge market problems. Fundamental problem. As more and more applications adopt LayerZero, the industry popularity of Omnichain-Token will also greatly increase, and it will eventually become the de facto universal standard for cross-chain assets and help the LayerZero protocol capture more value.