Technical Mechanism

While cross-chain bridges can be easily built with MAP protocol, the protocol itself targets a more fundamental problem and pursues grander vision: boosting the whole cross-chain ecosystem by building a solid cross-chain Dapp infrastructure. Any Dapp built with the infrastructure automatically inherits the cross-chain nature of MAP protocol without requiring the developers to tackle the error-prone cross-chain communications. With the technical threshold of building cross-chain Dapp reduced, the ecosystem shall thrive. Following layered design principle, MAP protocol is composed of three layers: MAP Relay Chain, MAP Omnichain Service and MAPO Application layer.

The underlying relay chain provides the capability to verify cross-chain messages in a purely trustless way, the cornerstone of MAP protocol. While many cross-chain solutions adopt the central or semi-central trust model, MAP protocol paves a trustless way by utilizing the cryptographic proof intrinsic to the blockchain system. This is made possible by the many light clients of interested blockchains living on the MAP Relay Chain and the light clients of the MAP Relay Chain living on all connected blockchains. This is where the true value of MAP protocol lies. Using a dedicated blockchain to maintain all the light clients gives us the flexibility to integrate necessary features to connect to all kinds of blockchains that might come up.

While cross-chain message verification can be abstracted and solved with MAP Relay Chain, it’s impossible to unify all the cross-chain messages serving diverse cross-chain Dapps. Besides, listening to cross-chain communication requests and constructing proper cryptographic proof for cross-chain messages are no easy jobs for most Dapp developers. Hence, MAP protocol provides the MAP Omnichain Service (MOS), middleware connecting MAP protocol’s underlying mechanism and smart contract interfaces of Dapps. On one side, MOS encapsulate the common facilities and services needed by various cross-chain Dapps, e.g., transparent asset vault contracts for fungible and non-fungible tokens and accompanied Messengers to deliver corresponding cross-chain transactions. In this way, common cross-chain Dapps such as cross-chain Swap can focus only on the swap logic while safely delegating the management of cross-chain asset transfer to MOS. On the other side, to keep MAP protocol as open as possible and to make MCS easily extensible, all utilities needed to build new type of Omnichain services are proper abstracted into developer friendly SDK so that anyone can extend the capability of MOS or craft their own vaults contracts and Messengers. MOS to MAP protocol is just like Google Mobile Service to the Android ecosystem. Developers can build upon or extend MOS as they see fit.

With Validators securing the underlying MAP Relay Chain and Maintainers updating the light clients’ state to reflect the most recent state of all connected blockchains, MAP Relay Chains can verify the cross-chain messages pegged with cryptographic proof submitted by Messengers. A strong and solid foundation is laid for the MAPO Application layer. Dapp developers can focus on what they can build in a world without barriers, might be a cross-chain DEX which finds the best exchange ratio across whole blockchain world for it users, might be NFT trading market where one can bid on any NFT even without the demand token in your wallet (that is bid with what you have and let the network swap for you automatically with the demand assets), or maybe a cross-chain data markets, where all kinds of information, e.g. prices from different chains are available in one place.

MAP Protocol provides the ultimate cross-chain infrastructure for cross-chain Dapp developers with optimized cost, application-ready, all-chain coverage, and cross-chain verification finality. Here, we have 10 technical highlights that summarize MAP’s mechanism.