Allow me to be frank for a moment: in the past, plenty of blockchain companies make big claims and either fail to execute, or had no intention of executing. Sometimes it was outright duplicity, and other times it was because they got onboard without a real roadmap towards success.
Blockchain Foundry (BCFN.C) isn’t one of those. They’ve made big promises—namely, to resolve blockchain’s scalability problem and to connect two otherwise disparate blockchain’s together via an interoperability bridge—and as of late last month, may have a viable solution to both of them by activating their new bridge protocol between the Syscoin and Ethereum blockchains.
That’s huge. How huge? Let me explain.
One of blockchain’s biggest stumbling blocks is interoperability. Blockchain’s don’t mingle. You need to convert an existing currency, like fiat or bitcoin, into gas, or the affectionate nickname given to the ethereum coin, and use that to access the ETH blockchain. Once there, you can initiate smart contracts and get yourself involved with decentralized applications and everything else that the ethereum ecosystem offers.
Now you don’t.
“We are excited to activate the Syscoin-Ethereum bridge. The new use cases it enables for both Syscoin and Ethereum users are a direct response to the needs that clients in our market space have demanded. With these enhanced capabilities, BCF can deliver a new breed of blockchain solutions to clients that leverage the strengths of both of these ecosystems,” said Dan Wasyluk, chief executive officer of Blockchain Foundry.
Interoperability
The new protocol is one of a kind. It uses cryptographic proofs between blockchains to enable a trustless bridge. Now existing projects on the Ethereum blockchain can transition over to Syscoin to take advantage of their fast, low-cost transactions, which will help projects scale beyond what Ethereum can offer. Syscoin and Syscoin’s platform tokens will also be able to use the bridge, giving project managers access to Ethereum’s smart contracts and wallet ecosystem.
There’s also a question of raw price.
Ether is presently going for CAD$316.81 while Sys is presently trading at $0.03236242. You can theoretically spend a nickle for one syscoin and get access to the ethereum blockchain. In practice it’s a bit more complicated—most places are going to have operating fees and buying minimum limits, but the point remains.
Here’s a short video on the bridge’s capabilities:
Here’s what we originally wrote about the interoperability bridge:
“Z-Dag is Blockchain Foundry’s solution to the blockchain’s scalability problem, wherein transactions could be completed in seconds rather than hours. This would remove one of the largest barriers to widespread adoption of cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange.”
This is accomplished by removing data that doesn’t need to be on the blockchain to increase throughput capacity. Kind of like removing unnecessary files from a hard-drive to speed up a computer.
The bridge allows Ethereum users, with its scalability issues, to take advantage of Syscoin’s superior scaling, and therefore more efficiently run their decentralized business and facilitate smart contracts with more ease.
Blockchain’s open-source contributions to the Syscoin protocol are supported by Syscoin’s decentralized governance system, which provides development grants in the form of Syscoin tokens. BCFN presently holds 3.8 million Syscoin tokens, which were valued at $122,071 as of Sept. 30, 2019, which was the date of the last financial report. The majority of blockchain foundry’s Syscoin holdings are used to operate masternodes, which generate a return of approximately 15% per year for the company in Syscoin.
—Joseph Morton