Initia: Pioneering Solutions for Customized Blockchain Applications
Understanding the progress of cryptocurrency technology can be challenging, but one constant remains: creating applications for blockchain is quite difficult. This difficulty arises because of the decentralized nature of blockchain, leading to a lack of consistent standards among various infrastructure components.
Initia, established by a team of developers in their late 20s, aims to enhance interoperability in multichain networks and make it easier to create application-specific blockchains known as app chains. While well-known blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin have gained widespread attention, app chains have become more prominent recently. These app chains offer developers greater flexibility in customization, allowing them to tailor economic and governance structures according to their specific needs
The division in the blockchain landscape causes significant inconvenience for users. They encounter various challenges such as dealing with different types of gas fees (picture having to pay in JPY, USD, and EUR just to access different features in an app), using multiple wallets (imagine being asked to connect your PayPal, Apple Pay, and WeChat Pay to one app), and navigating through different explorers (think of opening Firefox, Safari, and Chrome for different tasks within the same app).
Initia’s co-founder, Ezaan Mangalji, also known as “Zon,” explained in an interview, “This becomes 10 times more complicated when you transfer assets between different blockchains.”
To illustrate, consider the stablecoin USDC, which can exist in different versions on the same chain, like bUSDC, USDCet, and USDCso. This occurs because it has been “transferred to that chain over X, Y, Z different paths or bridges,” as explained by Mangalji. He highlighted that one of the advantages of Initia is that, in the multichain world, all assets are interchangeable. In this example, there would only be one type of USDC across potentially thousands of app-specific blockchains.
Developers also face challenges as they work across various chains. While initiatives like roll-ups aim to enhance efficiency and scalability in blockchains by eliminating validator sets, Mangalji noted that these methods can “worsen fragmentation and are rigid or inflexible for developers.”
On another front, Cosmos, which addresses the scaling issue in blockchain, is deemed “very flexible” but comes with the complexity of being challenging to operate. The founder highlighted that each Cosmos chain functions as a Layer 1 blockchain, demanding a validator set, and necessitates teams to ensure security by rewarding these validators.
Initia, as Mangalji explained, tackles both these challenges. It offers a Layer 1 blockchain network designed specifically to facilitate a system of L2 rollups. In this setup, rollups can achieve scalability and sovereignty effortlessly, with the added advantage of having the Cosmos SDK for comprehensive flexibility.