The long-awaited “Interchain Era” begins on Cosmos (ATOM)

The highly anticipated inter-blockchain communication (IBC) protocol transfers have gone live on Cosmos (ATOM), allowing users to transfer their tokens between different decentralized networks, its developers announced today.

“After 5 years of research and development, Inter Blockchain Communication is being rolled out onto the Cosmos Hub! This is the first step of enabling cross-chain communication, which activates IBC token transfers – allowing you to send fungible tokens from one chain to another,” said Cosmos developers.

Starting today, IBC-compatible blockchains can send their tokens to the Cosmos Hub as well as its native ATOM tokens. The system supports both fungible and non-fungible (NFTs) digital assets.

According to the developers, the launch of IBC opens up the doors for many new innovative applications such as token exchanges and NFT marketplaces. For example, the protocol can be used to create multi-chain smart contracts and split their logic between different blockchain. Thanks to this system, other blockchains can also solve their scaling issues by splitting popular decentralized applications (dapps) across multiple chains.

Christopher Goes, lead developer of the IBC protocol noted:

“IBC will have a transformative impact on the blockchain space by creating an ecosystem of politically independent chains that can interact via trade and information exchange. Knitting together many different blockchains can form a new crypto-economic system.”

Per the announcement, the IBC also has “huge potential” for various decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, and several such dapps are already in the pipeline for this year. One of them—decentralized exchange Gravity Dex—will be launched with the next Cosmos upgrade.

“The Gravity DEX will act as a marketplace for trading tokens from any connected blockchain, including tokens from IBC-enabled blockchains, wrapped ETH and ERC20 tokens, wrapped BTC tokens, as well as from any future networks that implement IBC,” the developers explained.

As CryptoSlate reported, the Stargate upgrade, which laid the groundwork for the IBC transfers, was launched in mid-February.