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Current State

Today, blockchain applications and their states are siloed within individual ecosystems. DeFi protocols, NFT platforms, and DAOs often live on separate chains, and their state—balances, contracts, and governance—are isolated:

DeFi Isolation

A lending protocol on Ethereum cannot natively access collateral from Solana.

NFT Barriers

An NFT marketplace on Polygon cannot verify ownership of assets on Avalanche.

Governance Gaps

A DAO on Base cannot process votes from Arbitrum token holders.
This fragmentation limits the potential for interoperability and creates hurdles for developers and users alike.

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Key Limitations

1

Atomic Cross-Chain Transactions

Executing operations that span multiple chains—such as swapping an asset on Ethereum while minting a token on Solana—requires custom bridges and introduces complex failure scenarios.
2

Unsharding State

State from different chains remains isolated, making it impossible for smart contracts to reason about the broader blockchain ecosystem.
3

Unified Cross-Chain Access

Users are burdened with managing multiple wallets, bridging tokens, and paying for gas fees in various native currencies.
4

Pricing Cross-Chain State Operations

In today’s blockchains, state writes come with a cost, whereas state reads are typically free. However, in a cross-chain world, state reads require provenance mechanisms to ensure the data’s validity and authenticity, incurring additional costs.

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Ritual’s Innovations

Ritual addresses the challenges of cross-chain interoperability through two key innovations:

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Enshrined State Reads

Today, Ritual integrates with Wormhole Guardian’s-attested query system to provide secure, on-chain data reads from supported chains. Our interface for accessing such capabilities is native (for ease of developer use), yet flexible, and we look forward to continuing to onboard more protocols available for cross-chain interoperability.

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Multi-Chain Coordination Hub

Ritual Chain serves as a Schelling point for autonomous agents operating across multiple blockchains by acting as a:
  1. Central coordination point for multi-chain agents
  2. Unified state view across chains
  3. Synchronized agent operation layer
This enables powerful use cases like:
  • Cross-chain yield optimization
  • Multi-chain arbitrage
  • Portfolio rebalancing across chains
See our cross-chain yield aggregation tutorial or smart agent case study for hands-on examples of how to use chain abstraction.