ZetaChain – omnichain with grassroots support

Every blockchain project is different and has different chances for success. But what is more or less sure is those with a bigger community have bigger chances to be successful. This is why collecting followers even of the early stage of development is important. When I came across the ZetaChain project I was positively surprised by the size of their community 400 thousand followers and 424 + thousand people joined the official ZetaChain Discord channel. For sure many other projects could learn PR from them.

The name of the Zeta chain comes from the letter Zeta, which is the 6th in the order of the Greek alphabet. According to the creators of the ZetaChains project, it is "the world's first and only blockchain that connects everything." Let's stop here for a moment and focus on the keyword - "everything" and its meaning by the creators. ZetaChain's capabilities include cross-chain and cross-layer value transfer, message delivery and smart contracts, which enables the creation of omnichain dApps. Since dApps are easy to explain (a decentralized application running on different blockchains), omnichain and the issues of using different blockchains require a bit of explaining.
Nowadays, if you want to have assets in different blockchain ecosystems, you have to open new wallets for each blockchain, and in case of buying or selling between each other, you have to send money to the exchange. This means spending time, and money and increasing the risk where tokens can be stolen somewhere on the way.

Have a look at this picture which explains the old exchange system and ZetaChain solution.

Blockchain agnostic

What the ZetaChain team also emphasizes is the simplification of the entire interaction with the system, which was created even for blockchain-agnostic users. Since I'm not a programmer myself, I could just trust the claim that instead of months of code writing, only days would be spent. Have you tried building a dApp on ZetaChain? If so, share your thoughts in the comments.
A few words encouraging developers to use dApps ZetaChain (from their website).
“The possibilities of what can be built with ZetaChain are endless, but some of the applications developers can create include:
• Cross-chain DEXs in native tokens without wrapping
• Decentralized and fault tolerant bridges
• Omnichain smart contracts that can monitor and execute events across all connected chains
• Cross-chain lending and yield protocols
• Omnichain NFT applications”

A bridge between systems

What makes ZetaChain extremely unique is its ability to work with different types of blockchains - smart contract blockchains such as Ethereum, as well as cumulative Ethereum L2, Solana, Terra and Algorand blockchains, and even non-smart contract blockchains such as like Bitcoin and Dogecoin. Currently, ZetaChain is running a testnet campaign where it allows swapping between – Georli testnet (ETH), Polygon Mumbai (MATIC) and BSC Testnet (BNB). On November 3, 2022, their test network was checked by 400,000 users. In December's tally-up, the team announced approximately 740,000+ as the official number of testnet users. I believe these are not final numbers yet. Official statistics from the ZetaChain website state that since then, 3.86 million cross-chain transactions and 57.09 million intra-Zeta transactions and 132 dApp contracts have been made. Without a doubt, these numbers are impressive.
What about competitors? The most serious seems to be Layer Zero, which offers similar but still more modest possibilities (mainly focusing on messaging). There is also couple different projects offering bridges and multi-swapping.

Team, investors and community

The Zeta Chain band does not reveal its personality. On their website, we can read more about the investors than about the team itself. Early investors include “Coinbase and Binance employees including Dan Romero, Sam Rosenblum and John Yi, as well as key contributors to some of the industry’s most widely adopted protocols and well-known funds, including former JD Kanani of Polygon and HwiSang Kim CIO by Hashed; the project's advisors are Nathalie McGrath, who as Coinbase's first head of people scaled the industry-leading exchange from a team of just 10 to over 800 employees, and Juan Suarez, who served as Coinbase's internal counsel from 2013 to 2022." For me, as a potential user, understanding who is behind this project would increase trust, but hiding team members has unfortunately become quite normal in the blockchain realm.
As I already wrote about, at the beginning of 2023, the ZetaChain community is impressive. In the official Telegram group - 60 thousand. + users, Twitter has nearly 400,000 followers, and 424+,000 people have joined the official ZetaChain Discord channel. Of course, there has been a monstrous growth in the last few months.

Summary

ZetaChain seems to be a prospective solution. Sooner or later, the entire blockchain world will reach interoperability. There is a need for such projects from the perspective of developers, users and investors. It makes no sense for developers to create different dApps for each blockchain if they can create one that could work on the most popular ones. When it comes to implementing ZetaChain, the testnet results seem promising. I really like the way the team works, checking all possible bugs first and getting a large community. This is definitely a good strategy and can wait for what will happen when the main net testnet will be on air. On the contrary, I feel a lack of transparency due to the very limited information about the founders and the team, but as I said, this seems to be a common practice these days. Since this is the first omnichain, many things and solutions have not been tested so far (which can also be seen in their Whitepaper, which is very theoretical).

Therefore, as always with pioneering projects, there is a greater margin of failure compared to projects that follow someone else's footsteps. But of course, greater risk means greater reward. On the other hand, I met opinions that ZetaChain is too slow and too precautionary in its actions. Meanwhile, another, bold in their action, project will come and take all the fame. Personally, I don’t think this is the case and as proof, I would like to use the Tortoise and the Hare story. Tired of the Hare's arrogant behaviour, the Tortoise challenges him to a race. The hare soon leaves the tortoise behind and, confident of winning, take a nap midway through the race. When the Hare awakes, however, he finds that his competitor, crawling slowly but steadily, has arrived before him. The moral of this story is that better to make a small and secure step than an epic failure and this is exactly the strategy ZetaChain sticks to.

More about ZetaChain here:

https://www.zetachain.com/
https://twitter.com/zetablockchain
https://discord.gg/zetachain
https://t.me/zetachainofficial
https://www.reddit.com/r/zetablockchain/

The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

DISCORD: Alkey#5998
Twitter: @Alexusikusik