Title: Introducing Map3
Description:
We’re thrilled to publish the first version of Map3, a protocol for assets interoperability.
Map3 helps developers scale crypto assets and network support in their apps. We do this by hosting an open source index of assets across networks with rich assets metadata. These Assets are linked via an on-chain data verification protocol in a way that helps you understand the relationship between them. The data can be easily consumed programmatically and is maintained by the community. Think of us like NPM (a code package manager ) for crypto assets.
We think Map3 is a critical piece of Web3 interoperability infrastructure that has been missing — until now.
As the number of interoperable crypto assets and networks grows, it’s become increasingly difficult to establish the relationship between assets within and across networks. Developers historically have to manually group assets that are equivalent or related to each other in order to build good customer experiences or to trade/transact.
Let’s look through an example:
Searching for the term “USDC” on Nomics returns hundreds of different versions of USDC. However, USDC is centrally issued on 8 networks by Centre.
So what’s going on here? When canonical assets are held by protocols they usually issue an I Owe You (”IOU”) derivative of the asset back to the user. This re-tokenisation enables use cases such as bridging of assets across networks, liquid staking and yield-bearing tokens.
Imagine being a developer tasked with creating a UI that displays the USDC Balance of a user across networks. You’re going to need a map with pointers for the instances of USDC on the different networks. Think about how many you’d need to group today for that single asset in order to get your app completed!
How Bad Good could this get?