Introduction to $ROUTE
$ROUTE or the Router Protocol is a Layer 1 solution that aims at solving the segregated chain problem. With the protocol, different blockchains can communicate with each other.
There are 30+ blockchains with each having their own ecosystem of applications and the bridges that connect them are not stable enough. Bridges transmit information slowly and are prone to hacks. This is exactly the problem $ROUTE aims at solving.
What are the problems in inter-blockchain communication :-
- Fragmented Liquidity – Different chains cannot share liquidity, resulting in lower liquidity in each chain.
- Collaboration – Different ecosystem of devs and communities cannot easily collaborate.
- Security – Bridges are prone to hacks.
What can be built on the router protocol
The router protocol website themselves have given some great examples of products that can be built using their cross-chain protocol.
- Cross chain yield aggregator
- Cross chain lending protocols
- Cross chain NFT marketplaces
There’s a whole list of use cases mentioned on their website here and we’re pretty sure devs can come up with a dozen more use cases when it comes to cross-chain communication.
How does it work?
This is a very basic diagram of how the router protocol does what it does. Without getting too technical, we can see that this works on a kind of pub-sub model.
There is a listener that is subscribed to the source chains, whose job is to forward the transaction happening on any source chain to the writer. The writer then makes changes to the transaction to reformat it into a valid destination format transaction.
The router interface sitting between them acts as a messenger.
What is crazy to think is that the $ROUTE team has a bounty of $200,000 set for anyone who is able to hack the protocol.
The reason behind their confidence is :-
- Validation System – The network is only compromised when 67% voters chose to.
- POS economics
- High bridge level security
The Developer Ecosystem
The router ecosystem is also very developer friendly with devs having to write only one piece of code and that is compatible with all blockchains. Devs also get access to composable middleware and state tracking. (only cross chain solution where this is available).
The router team has given these cross-chain dapps the term ‘iDapps’ and it is very easy for any developer to get started with building their first iDapp.
Some of the features available are –
- Transaction batching
- Metamask compatibility
- Modular Security
- Cross chain meta transactions
- Refund system
Because of the ease of building iDapps, the number of product on the protocol are increasing every single day with the total number oer 170 includig game-fi , social-fi and NFT projects.
$ROUTE tokenomics
Current Price: $7 (16 December 2023)
Current Market Cap: $97M
TS: 20M $ROUTE
CS: 13.9M $ROUTE
ATH: $19.04 (16 May 2021)
Looking at the tokenomics, the fact that $ROUTE had touched $19 in the 2021 bull run and has since vastly improved their ecosystem and products points to a new ATH in 2024 (NFA). The circulating supply has definitely increased but if $ROUTE can be the de-facto cross chain protocol, I think even a $500M market cap is not a big deal in the next two years.
That is it for our $ROUTE review, to check out other reviews by the Our Crypto Talk team, head over to our blogs page.
