Polygon Labs claims that Canto will benefit from decentralized security and trustless guarantees when bridging assets by inheriting Ethereum’s security.
Canto, a Cosmos-native, layer-1 blockchain, is the latest in a growing list of chains migrating to Ethereum as a layer-2 zero-knowledge rollup. Astar, another layer-1 blockchain, previously announced plans to migrate from the Polkadot ecosystem to Ethereum.
Canto is a decentralized, open-source blockchain that is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). It aims to bring traditional financial institutions and users into the world of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.
An agreement has been reached between Canto Commons, a framework for coordinating ideas and solutions for the Canto protocol, and its core developers. The developers will build a zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup on Ethereum’s layer 2 network, as Polygon Labs announced on September 18.:
“By leveraging a shared ZK bridge, Canto will eventually tap the liquidity of a unified Polygon ecosystem with easy access to Ethereum.”
According to Polygon Labs, Canto will benefit from Ethereum’s network security by inheriting it, enabling more decentralization and trustless guarantees when bridging assets
Polygon Labs states that Canto’s validators and staking systems will remain unchanged.
The Canto follows moves from Astar
In addition to Canto, several other platforms like Astar, Gnosis Pay, Palm, and IDEX have also announced plans to build zero-knowledge layer 2s using Polygon’s Chain Development Kit, according to Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon Labs.
On September 13, the team behind Astar announced their plans to build their own Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution, Astar ZK-Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Like Canto, the Astar team will be utilizing Polygon’s CDK.
Polygon Labs sees potential in Astar’s ZK-powered chain to drive Web3 technology adoption, offering speed, scalability, and security in Japan and beyond.
Bankless co-host Ryan Sean Adams suggests that migrations to Ethereum by Astar and Canto could be just the start of a significant trend toward roll-up solutions.
Not every protocol is sticking around on Ethereum
Meanwhile, some protocols appear to be moving in the other direction.
In September, decentralized exchange dYdX announced its plan to migrate away from Ethereum and build a new exchange on the Cosmos blockchain. The move is part of dYdX’s push to create a “purely decentralized” order book exchange, which they will build using the Cosmos SDK.
Similarly, another Ethereum-native protocol, Maker, has signaled its intention to move away from Ethereum and build a new chain using Solana’s codebase.
Maker’s co-founder, Rune Christensen, has highlighted Solana’s resilience during the recent FTX debacle and its larger and highly skilled developers as key reasons for exploring a move to the Solana ecosystem.
Nonfungible token (NFT) collection OnChainMonkey has announced its intention to migrate its entire collection of 10,000 NFTs from Ethereum to Bitcoin, highlighting the security of the Bitcoin base layer and the growing Bitcoin Ordinals ecosystem as key reasons for the decision.
