Asterizm: Redefining Blockchain Interoperability for Enterprises

Preamble

The Web3 industry is actively evolving, attracting not only retail users in DeFi seeking to grow their capital but also large enterprises from the Web2 world looking to leverage new technologies like, for example, blockchain to optimize their business and, of course, to participate in the rapidly developing DeFi ecosystems, offering access to high deposit interest rates and other financial opportunities to their clients.

Introduction

The number of L2 networks, new consensus mechanisms in L1 networks, and enterprise departments in large blockchains are steadily emerging and growing, as is the desire of existing blockchain interoperability solutions to connect more new blockchains, achieving full compatibility, seamless liquidity, and user flow.

However, two critically important cross-chain communication scenarios, which are in great demand and widely covered by the industry media, seem to be overlooked. The first scenario is interoperability between private blockchains, and the second is interoperability between private and public blockchains.

Asterizm, a new blockchain interoperability solution, focuses precisely on these two use cases, blending infrastructure modularity, data privacy, fully on-chain cross-chain transaction validation mechanism, and requiring no off-chain consensus.

Inside the tech

To meet the needs and challenges of enterprise products entering the Web3 market, Asterizm was developed with a flexible architecture. Asterizm ensures data privacy, thanks to a dedicated off-chain module that clients have to run on their server (within any security framework) to transfer payload (data) from one network to another.

It also relies on a unique cross-chain transaction validation mechanism that uses participating blockchain cryptography to calculate a hash based on the payload and validate the unique transaction identifier xID generated when the cross-chain transaction is initiated on the source network on a smart contract. This eliminates the need for off-chain consensus, significantly speeds up, and reduces the cost of transactions.

To launch any cross-chain project based on Asterizm, you need to perform just two simple steps:

1. Write and deploy a smart contract with your business logic to the desired blockchains. This smart contract should be extended from the Asterizm abstraction smart contract and include methods such as send and receive. In addition to the business logic, you’ll need to specify which relay will be used to transmit proofs of cross-chain transactions to the destination network (either Asterizm servers or attested partners).

   
   

2. Launch the Asterizm Docker image on your server. This software was developed by the Asterizm team for transferring payloads from one network to another. This server pulls data from the smart contract in the source chain and transfers it to the destination chain. Before execution in the destination network, the data is verified using proofs received from the relay servers.

You can explore the detailed guide here!

Who needs it and why

One prominent example of using this technology in the corporate sector is the creation of a bridge between private and public blockchains. For example, a FinTech project or a bank issues a synthetic stablecoin in a private chain, backed by the bank's reserves or clients’ funds, for further use in DeFi ecosystems across various blockchains. This allows them to offer their clients access to financial opportunities such as high deposit rates and farming pools. To enable the transfer of the synthetic stablecoin from a private network to a public network, it is necessary to build a bridge.

However, using third-party solutions is risky both from legal and operational perspectives.

Disclosing information about the amount of stablecoins to be transferred, recipient addresses, and other data to third parties (e.g., validators in traditional blockchain interoperability solutions) is prohibited by data protection laws. Additionally, it presents reputational risks for the bank, especially if an interoperability solution has tokens or tokenized infrastructure.

Asterizm is fully compliant with the requirements of banks and financial institutions. It provides a client off-chain module (docker image) for confidential payload transmission between networks. The bank deploys it on its server, ensuring its protection. Moreover, during the execution of cross-chain transactions, third-party relays (provided by Asterizm or accredited partners) have no access to the data. They are only responsible for transmitting transaction proofs used for the verification of integrity and validity of cross-chain transactions on the smart contract in the destination network.

As a result, the bank can have confidence in the privacy of the transmitted data, fast delivery of messages, legal security of cross-chain operations through Asterizm's non-tokenized infrastructure, and reliability of the cross-chain transaction validation mechanism. It is an entirely on-chain process based on cryptography, which eliminates the possibility of protocol hacks or tampering, as long as at least one off-chain server operates correctly.

The competitors

Below is a comparison table for a number of key features, illustrating that Asterizm Protocol is a solid and competitive technology in the cross-chain provider market:

Summary

To summarize, the cross-chain market is growing not only due to the development of Web3, but also due to significant interest in blockchain technologies from large companies, CBDCs, and even governments launching pilot projects in this industry.

Asterizm aims to become one of the leading solutions for interoperability between private-private and private-public blockchains, sharing this market with colleagues from other prominent blockchain interoperability protocols.

Asterizm.io | White paper | TG Dev. chat

Founders: Artem Avdeev(CEO), Alexander Gotovets(CTO), Denis Polulyakhov(CBDO)