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.
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.
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.