The Future of Prism — Part 4: Cross Chain Smart Contract Interactions
As previously outlined in Part 2, Prism Network aims to achieve cross chain swaps to allow for trading of any token on any network with any token on any other connected network with the Prism Network ecosystem. While this in itself represents a significant improvement in cross-chain interoperability, there naturally arises from this a ‘next level’. That is, facilitating a smart contract to be able to directly interact with a different smart contract on another network.
Currently, smart contracts on each isolated network take it for granted that they can interact with other smart contracts on the same chain. This composability is an important part of the DeFi ecosystem as it allows projects to build upon each other in ever more complex and interesting/innovative ways. For instance, a token can yield farm using another project’s smart contracts and then deliver this value back to their own project all seamlessly and automatically by directly calling smart contract functions and integrating this all into their own code.
With cross chain swaps, this same paradigm could be expanded to allow for direct smart contract function calls across all connected networks within Prism Network. What this means, carrying on the yield farming example, is that a project on Network A could yield farm on Network B and then transfer the rewards back to Network A. All in much the same manner projects do this currently within a network.
This is again tying into one of our central philosophies of empowering developers with the tools they need to innovate. When you empower developers, that is where true innovation emerges and from this real value is created/discovered.
A note here is that this is not restricted to just Network A <-> Network B, but because of the ever expanding scope of connected networks, smart contract functions could route through multiple networks. In fact, to continue the yield farming example again, a project could look at yield farming opportunities across all the connected networks, analyse where it can get the highest return rate and yield farm there before pulling the profits back to their ‘home’ network. Or, with the Prism Factory they could reward their users on the network they are yield farming on. This highlights how the many features that Prism Network has can complement each other to give developers even greater possibilities. On top of all of this, Prism Network is also integrated into EmpireDEX which just gives developers even more tools to utilise.
Personally we find the potential that cross-chain smart contract interactions opens up is both incredibly exciting and broad in scope. So many possibilities emerge from providing this crucial and much needed infrastructure to the DeFi space.
