Flare Network, a blockchain software company, has received a 7-figure Algorand Foundation SupaGrant to develop a cross-chain bridge that would integrate the Bitcoin network into the Algorand ecosystem. The company said in a blog post that the bridge will be engineered "using Flare's native cross-chain protocols, offering greater security than existing technology through the use of consensus and risk mitigation to manage bridging rather than a custodial multi-signature approach."
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Sean Rowan, CTO & Co-founder of Flare, says the current cross-chain solutions remain unsatisfactory as many of them are often more centralized and less secure than the blockchains they serve:
"Flare's new approach is an entirely different way, built from the ground up rather than being based on existing bridging technology — and will bring a breakthrough in secure, decentralized interoperability between any and all chains."
The bridge will also enable interoperability between ALGO and BTC, as well as other altcoins such as DOGE, LTC, XRP and XLM. Based on decentralized interoperability protocols — the Flare Time Series Oracle (FTSO) and the State Connector, the bridge could "potentially be upgraded" to support ALGO and smart contracts on Layer 1, Flare added.
In addition to the cross-chain bridge, Flare will also add support for tokenized version of bitcoin, making the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization available in DeFi, NFT, metaverse and other Web3 applications on Flare. The timeline of the development remains undisclosed.
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