Launching a token on a given blockchain is generally not difficult or complicated. But launching a token across multiple chains was more challenging.
Referring to a “native chain” as opposed to a “bridged” or “packaged” version of a token is the status quo these days.
A new service from the general message passing protocol Axelar aims to change that, making it trivially easy to launch tokens on one or more of the supported networks, with no coding skills required.
The new tool, called the Interchain Token Service, preserves the fungibility and properties of each ERC-20 token, while allowing them to move across all EVM-compatible blockchains in Axelar’s orbit – currently 15 chains, with more to come.
ITS may be used without permission and tokens also enjoy trust-minimized bridging using a “mint and burn” mechanism, features that currently do not exist in the industry according to Axelar’s DeFi head Jason Ma.
“The other alternative solution currently on the market is LayerZero OFT, but is often not a code-free solution, and based on the feedback we’ve heard from developers, it can take anywhere from a week’s work to months of work,” Ma told Blockworks.
Read more: LayerZero’s wstETH bridge implementation draws Lido DAO ire
Frax, which is about to launch its own Ethereum package, Fraxtal is one of the first to use ITS. Nader Ghazvini, co-founder of Fraxtal, hopes the service will help attract developers to the new chain.
“By integrating Interchain Token Service from the start, the Fraxtal L2 enables seamless, no-code interoperability for many builders joining on the ground floor,” Ghazvini said in a statement.
ITS can be used to deploy a new token across multiple chains in one step, but it also includes a “token manager” that can unify the deployment of native tokens already on multiple chains.
That puts it in the same category as Circle’s cross-chain transfer protocol (CCTP) used to bridge native USDC between chains, only without the centralized counterparty.
“It is essentially a decentralized open-source CCTP that can use and deploy any protocol itself,” Ma said.
read more: Circle moves native USDC offering to Cosmos mainnet
The token manager can be used by teams that want to connect native token implementations, for example to meet compliance requirements.
“For the chains that they consider strategically important with a lot of liquidity, they naturally want to mint,” Ma said, giving Ethereum, Polygon and Arbitrum as examples. For other chains, “they could just use off-the-shelf ITS and use an Axelar version of that token on the other chains, and it would still be fully interoperable,” he said.
For now, only EVM chains are supported, but Axelar – itself a Cosmos chain – plans to expand the service to the Cosmos Interchain later this year.
