Cardano to Launch Its First Cross-Chain Bridge With Link to Nervos

Public chain projects Nervos and Cardano said they plan to enable interoperability across their platforms within the next six weeks. The bridge furthers their goals of discovering the industry's "Bluetooth moment," Nervos and IOHK, according to the development team behind Cardano.

The launch is significant because it links two ecosystems worth billions of dollars in terms of market capitalization, the companies said in a press release on Wednesday. It is the first bridge for cardano (ADA), currently valued at $56.3 billion and the market's fourth most valued crypto.

Blockchain accelerator Mousebelt has been tapped to develop the tech, with funding to come from a Nervos grant. The Cardano team will commit expertise and resources to connect its network.

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The Force Bridge, as it's known, will allow users to interchangeably transact with Nervos or Cardano's native currencies (CKB and ADA). It will also enable participants to create their own wrapped tokens – cryptos that are pegged to the value of another – and do so across both chains, according to the release.

The bridge is expected to reduce transaction costs across both platforms' cryptocurrencies while reducing the burden for users to possess different wallets to access features from both networks. It will let developers from both chains access services and features to expand their decentralized applications and user bases, the companies said.

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“We believe that blockchain technology will only achieve mainstream acceptance when end users are not locked into one blockchain or standard," IOHK CTO Romain Pellerin said. "Bridges like this are an absolute necessity in order to ensure that users have a seamless experience,”

It isn't the first time the two projects have collaborated. In December they launched a joint research initiative to increase the security of smart contracts by improving Unspent Transaction Outputs – a common accounting method used by blockchains. They also announced they would be furthering future open-source development while exploring the creation of a universal standard for the accounting method.