Datachain Successfully Completes Building an IBC Bridge Between Cosmos and Harmony on the Local Testnet

August 16, 2022

Datachain has been building a bridge between Cosmos (Tendermint-based blockchain) and Harmony since the January 2022 announcement. Today, we’re pleased to announce that Datachain successfully completed building a bridge between Cosmos and Harmony on the local testnet. Since we use the IBC Protocol as a communication protocol, the bridge operates as trustless interoperability between IBC-enabled blockchains and Harmony.

The bridge will enable interoperability between Cosmos and Harmony ecosystems, generating higher utility across both chains, leading to community expansion and new cross-chain use cases.

Grant Results

Through this partnership, Datachain built not only light clients and modules but also a sample application to transfer tokens between Harmony and Cosmos. You can see our sample application code and the light client implementations from the links below.

Sample application to transfer an HRC-20 token on Harmony to the Cosmos blockchain as an ICS-20 token

https://github.com/datachainlab/harmony-cosmos-bridge-demo

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Harmony light client implementation

https://github.com/datachainlab/ibc-harmony-client

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(Check out the grant details on this forum post)

Next Step

Datachain and Harmony will continue to work on building a bridge that enables trustless token transfers between Harmony and Cosmos in the mainnet environment.

As you might know, the high execution cost (gas cost) in the verification process is often a problem, especially for EVM chains such as Harmony. To overcome the gas cost challenge and enable secure and efficient interoperability, we are discussing adopting LCP, a proxy middleware for light client verification that realizes trust-minimized and gas-efficient cross-chain bridges. LCP will solve the gas cost issue by executing light client verification in the Enclave using TEE and enables low-cost verification of a target chain.

Learn more and follow the latest updates about LCP from the link below:

Comment from Ganesha Upadhyaya, Research Engineer at Harmony

Congratulations to Datachain team for completing this first grant to enable inter-operability between Harmony and Cosmos chains. The completion of this grant was key to fully explore the inter-operability between a sharded blockchain (Harmony) with a multi-chain ecosystem (Cosmos). This exploration resulted in the invention of a novel technology called LCP(Light Client Proxy) which could become the future’s widely adopted inter-operability technology. The next grant will focus on productionizing this inter-operability technology to enable seamless asset transfers between these two ecosystem. We hope to continue working with the Datachain team to connect Harmony to other blockchain ecosystems.
by @gupadhyaya

Stay tuned for more updates!

What are Cosmos and IBC?

Cosmos is now one of the largest interoperability ecosystems in the world, and IBC is the communication protocol developed by Cosmos and Interchain Foundation, which enables various chains to be interconnected. After the release of IBC in April 2021, it has made huge progress. According to the Map of zones, there are 47 active chains and over 2.5 million IBC transfers in 30 days.

What is Harmony?

Harmony is one of the latest EVM-compatible blockchain platforms. Harmony’s mainnet runs Ethereum applications with 2-second transaction finality and 1,000 times lower fees, as well as secure bridges to Ethereum and other chains. There is an increasing number of applications built on Harmony, such as DeFi Kingdom, Tranquil.finance, Mars Colony, Unite Finance, Rocket Monsters, Enders Gate and Hundred Finance. You can see more on Harmony Universe and Defi Llama.

What is Datachain?

Datachain is a blockchain startup founded in 2018 and has worked on creating value through interoperability for blockchains. Datachain is the core contributor of YUI, a Hyperledger Lab, that enables interoperability between multiple heterogeneous blockchains through the IBC protocol and develops Cross Framework that enables cross-chain transactions. In Addition, Datachain also unveiled LCP, a proxy for light client verification that realizes trust-minimized and gas-efficient cross-chain bridges. Granted by Interchain Foundation and Harmony, and as a member of Hyperledger Foundation and Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, Datachain provides its interoperability solutions to contribute to those communities. For more information about Datachain, please visit https://www.datachain.jp/. Follow Datachain on Twitter.

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