Why We Are Building Poseidon

As the number of blockchains continues to proliferate we are faced with the challenge of both users and liquidity becoming increasingly fragmented across these platforms. Worse yet, this continues to degrade the already poor user experience Web3 apps are famous for.

Picture this, you hear about some new app you want to use but quickly discover that it's on a blockchain you haven't heard of before. All your gas and tokens are somewhere else so you set about figuring out which bridge seems safe enough to use and then wait for bridging to complete. Sound familiar?

The world Web3 users live in today is one of blockchains and bridges, where they are often forced to use the app closest to their tokens out of convenience rather than the one they would most prefer to use. For Web3 to be successful, this needs to change.

Enter Poseidon. Imagine a world where apps are free to build on whatever blockchain best suits their needs, while at the same time being available to users that can interact with whichever apps they like without having to worry about the plumbing behind the scenes. No figuring out how to pay gas, no bridging, no need even to know what blockchain they are using.

We call this Balance Abstraction. Users deposit their funds into Poseidon on any blockchain, and are then able to create vouchers which are instantaneously redeemable for their token on another participating blockchain.

This may just sound like another form of bridging, but it’s not. With a bridge, you always have to wait a period of time before you can use your tokens on another blockchain. This is because they are sent on demand using cross-chain messaging, and these messages take time to arrive. There is extensive research showing just how much speed matters to users. All else being equal, the faster app will win in a competitive market.

Poseidon works by predicting demand and preemptively bridging tokens to where they will be needed. This means once a user has their voucher for a token, they are able to use it on another blockchain right away. This solves one of the core usability problems we face in our emerging multi-chain world.

There’s a lot going on under the hood to make this work, and we'll be exploring all this and why we think this is such a big deal over the coming weeks. Subscribe to our mailing list below and follow @0xPFL to stay up to date.