Everyone’s talking about omnichain NFTs lately.

But what exactly are omnichain NFTs, though?

If you’re in the dark about what omnichain NFTs are, no worries — this article will show you all you need to know about this phenomenon that has recently taken the crypto-economy by storm.

Understanding Omnichain NFTs

The recent interest surge in omnichain is linked to the rise of LayerZero Labs, a Canada-based team building the interoperability protocol LayerZero.

Simply put, LayerZero is a transport layer for messaging that allows smart contracts to easily communicate among many or any blockchains.

If you want to dive deep, check out the protocol’s whitepaper here.

The protocol currently supports blockchains that use the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), e.g., Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon.

However, the LayerZero team plans to add support for non-EVM chains like Cosmos hub and beyond.

How does LayerZero Protocol Work

To understand how the LayerZero Protocol works, you have to compare omnichain to crosschain & multichain.

Crosschain transactions happen when two or more different blockchains can communicate directly.

Multichain technology allows projects to exist on at least two blockchains simultaneously. E.g.: Polkadot and Cosmos.

The LayerZero protocol functions differently from those mentioned above…

For example, the crosschain model entails using a bridge to migrate or wrap assets onto other chains directly. If you bridge ETH over the Ronin bridge to use Katana, your ETH directly moves from Ethereum to Ronin.

The LayerZero protocol is only messaging, no intermediary layer, wrapping, etc. It has instant support for any chain supporting the messaging layer with no extra trust assumptions or separate consensus.

This process is very different from popular Ethereum L2 scaling solutions.

The rise of omnichain NFTs

Omnichain NFTs are NFTs that can exist in two or more chains.

In recent months, interest around them has spiked with the arrival of LayerZero.

Now, NFTs can exist in much wider ways.

Imagine holding an NFT on Ethereum L1 while still doing things with it on L2 scaling solutions.

But then, omnichain NFTs aren’t new or limited to LayerZero. For example, UMA’s Optimistic Oracle already has some omnichain functionalities. There are also some other projects like Axie Infinity and CoolCats bridging the L1-L2 NFT gap.

I believe that we’ll see many additional projects with new approaches to omnichain NFT activities over time.

And that’s it!

If you read through…

Thank you.

Learned anything?

Lemme know in the comments.

P.S: Inspired by Bankless’ article.