Imagine you’re an artist who creates beautiful artworks and mints them as NFTs on Avalanche, because you’re trying to avoid those pesky Ethereum gas fees. But then you see the Meta announcement that you’ll only be able to showcase your NFTs on Facebook and Instagram if they live on Ethereum or Polygon (at least to begin with). You feel frustrated and disappointed that your followers won’t be able to properly experience your amazing creations or reach new audiences, and that you’ll miss out on the potential sales boost of your hard work and creation. 

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This is the current landscape of blockchains, which are isolated systems unable to communicate with each other without a third party. They need ‘bridges’ to allow them to interact; cross-chain protocols that provide an agreed-upon method of transferring information or value across different blockchains. However, current cross-chain protocols are severely limited by cost and security risks, as well as by the fact that they can only link two blockchains together at a time. Until recently, there was no way to truly have an NFT on any other chain except the one it was minted on. Bridging your NFT using a cross-chain protocol like Wormhole, for example, doesn’t transfer the real NFT to your destination chain. Instead, it locks the original NFT in a Wormhole contract, and gives you a replica NFT on the destination chain. But you can't really sell a replica; it flies in the face of everything NFTs stand for.

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There’s some good news, however. We’re currently entering a new phase of ‘omnichain’ technology, which allows users to ‘traverse’ their crypto assets between multiple blockchains, and for NFTs to be verified as assets on each of the destination chains. To go back to the example above: as an artist minting your NFTs on Avalanche, you can traverse them to Polygon or Ethereum using an omnichain like LayerZero. You can then sell them on OpenSea, which runs on Ethereum, and display them on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for all your followers to see. There are other benefits of omnichain assets too, like NFTs that have different attributes or utilities depending on which chain they’re on. There’s also the potential for omnichain assets to be integrated into future games or applications, regardless of which blockchain they run on. 

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This is a huge revolution in the space, and some creators are already taking advantage of the many possibilities it offers. The NFT project Tiny Dinos is one of the first truly omnichain NFTs, created in April 2022. The pixelated, pastel coloured characters were minted simultaneously across seven different blockchains (Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, Fantom, Arbitrum, and Optimism) and are transferable across any of these networks. Since its release a month ago, Tiny Dinos has traded a volume of 3,700 ETH, or a little over $9 million USD at the time of writing. 

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Culture Vault is actively looking into omnichain smart contracts and hopes to mint omnichain NFTs for creators in the not so distant futur. By utilising omnichain technology, both NFT and blockchain projects stand to benefit from wider coverage and non-proprietary usage. The ability to traverse assets over multiple chains allows creators to collaborate on projects across protocols, and to extend their reach beyond a single network. Artists can share their vision and expand their user base in new ecosystems, while collectors and crypto users are empowered with the choice to decide which blockchain best suits their needs for any given application.