Understanding the Importance of Cross Chain dApps

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In this world of evolution, Web3 is also growing rapidly and this can be seen with the introduction of multi-chain and cross-chain dApps. With an increase in the need for blockchains to communicate with each other, these concepts of multi-chain and cross-chain dApps are revolutionary. In this blog post, we’ll help you understand the differences between multi-chain and cross-chain dApps development.

Multi-Chain dApps

Multi-chain dApps are applications that are deployed on more than one blockchain, but they are isolated deployments which means that they are not connected to each other and do not communicate with each other, even if both applications are the same.

Whenever smart contracts of a multi-chain dApp are deployed on a new blockchain network, it creates an entirely new copy of smart contracts on that network, thus creating their own separate internal states for managing data (eg- tracking balances). These dApps have no to limited interoperability between deployments on different blockchains networks. This affects the user experience as they do not necessarily get the same experience on using the same dApp on two different blockchain networks.

Cross-Chain dApps 

Cross-chain is an emerging concept for dApps development. It involves smart contracts on different blockchain networks that can communicate and coordinate with each other. They work behind the scenes to allow end-users to access and utilize their assets and resources on one chain from another chain.

This concept empowers the developers to split up their applications and modularize them in order to take advantage of the unique features of different blockchain networks. For example, different smart contracts on different chains for specific functionalities and they are synced together and work as a single entity.

Blockchains by default do not have any mechanism to send and receive data between different networks. This functionality can be achieved by cross-chain bridges which enable an exchange of information between networks. However cross-chain dApps require more generalized bridges which are secure, reliable, and free from corruption. These all requirements can be achieved by decentralized oracles which in the past solved the issue of the inability of blockchain to access off-chain resources. The latest evolution in order to achieve this cross-chain interoperability functionality is General Message Passing (GMP).