Cross-Chain Messaging

Chainflip's Cross-chain Messaging (CCM) capabilities allow developers to not just swap assets between chains but also passing an arbitrary messages and calling a smart contract on the destination chain. Chainflip's unique architecture enables interoperability between non-smart contract chains and smart contract chains that goes beyond the simple transfer of assets. This is achieved by allowing users to specify a message that will be passed to the user's smart contract on the destination chain along with the destination asset.

With CCM users can swap currency X on chain A for currency Y on chain B and call a smart contract on chain B when the tokens are sent to the destination address on chain B.

Chain and Assets supported

Receiving cross-chain messages is only supported on EVM chains. However, thanks to Chainflip's deposit channel architecture, cross-chain messaging can be initiated from any chain, even if that chain does not support smart contracts. Messages can be passed along with any asset supported by Chainflip.

Capabilities

Cross-chain messaging enables for a large degree of interoperability and and opens up the opportunity for all kinds of applications to be built on top. Here is an example for a cross-chain DEX aggregation platform:

• User has BTC on Bitcoin and wants to add ETH liquidity to a Uniswap pool on Ethereum.
• The user initiates a swap of BTC to ETH via Chainflip, passing a message to the user's smart contract on Ethereum. That message is crafted using a DEX Aggregator integrated with Chainflip.
• Chainflip swaps native BTC to native ETH and sends the resulting ETH, along with the message, to the DEX aggregator's smart contract on Ethereum.
• The DEX aggregator's smart contract on Ethereum receives the ETH and the message, decodes it and adds liquidity to the desired Uniswap pool.

In this example, the user has been able to add liquidity to a Uniswap pool on Ethereum using BTC on Bitcoin in a single click.

While this is just a straightforward instance of a cross-chain messaging use case, the potential applications for cross-chain messaging are vast, given that it can accomodate for any arbitrary message.