ZetaChain is the world's first and only public blockchain that connects all other blockchains. Access all of your assets and data in a single place, securely. It facilitates cross-chain and cross-layer value transfer, message delivery, and smart contract calls — thus enabling for the first time omnichain dApps (odApps) which can leverage liquidity on multiple networks and read and update states on all connected networks.

It’s hard to imagine a single blockchain would suffice for all our society’s use cases. A multi-chain future seems inevitable. However, a multi-chain future without interoperability between the blockchains could be paralleled to the Internet before TCP/IP. Today’s blockchains are too fragmented and are by-nature not interoperable, hindering mass adoption of the technologies. For example, a decentralized application (dApp) must be married to a specific blockchain. If a user onboards into the crypto ecosystem through a given dApp, this fragmentation makes immense barriers for the user to fluidly adopt or try a dApp on another chain. To address the issues of interoperability, there have been a few proposals and projects that specifically emphasize the ability to inter-operate. However, the majority of interoperability systems only apply to specific blockchains, standardize their protocols within their own systems requiring other blockchains to adopt or through complicated, restricted, and/or less secure bridges to join.

Developers looking to support multiple networks end up with the complexity of maintaining their dApps on multiple networks, each with their own challenges and limitations. At the same time, users looking to get the best yields and use different dApps end up using different bridges to move assets across networks. Each of these bridges has their own custom wrapped tokens and trust models, which fragments liquidity and creates a confusing and costly user experience for users — multiple interfaces, paying for multiple transactions, and so on.

ZetaChain is first of all a public blockchain with Proof-of-Stake validators. It’s trusted that a super majority (>66% nodes) of the validator nodes are honest and act according to protocol, and collectively serve as notaries. In addition to being a blockchain, interoperability requires observing other blockchains. Thus each ZetaChain validator node is attached with an observer that scans other blockchains for relevant events (event log, transaction, or state at a certain time).

Possibilities of what can be built with ZetaChain are endless but some applications that developers can build include:

• Cross-chain DEXes in native tokens without wrapping

• Decentralized and fault tolerant bridges

• Omnichain smart contracts that can monitor and perform events on all connected chains

• Cross-chain lending and yield protocols

• Omnichain NFT apps

In summary, ZetaChain is designed to be a decentralized cross-blockchain smart contract platform. The vision of ZetaChain is to be a public computer on all important blockchains, on top of which cross-blockchain decentralized applications can be easily built as public, trustless, and persistent smart contracts.