At Router Protocol, our differentiation lies within our pillars of reliability. A testament to this bold declaration is our dedication to staying true to our publicly accessible roadmap.

We recently launched our mainnet on 27th Jan 2022. To say that the community received this launch well would be a huge understatement. Now, we are incredibly excited to announce that Router Protocol has expanded its operations to include the Avalanche network. In this post, we will discuss everything that makes this integration special and discover what this means for the future of Router Protocol and the entire ecosystem of interoperable blockchain networks.

Let us start by learning a bit about Avalanche and what makes it so popular.

About Avalanche

We all are well versed with the increasing limitation of the Ethereum network. Gas fees are sky-high, transactions take a long time, and users are desperately looking for alternatives to build dApps and conduct transitions seamlessly. One such alternative that rose above its peers is Avalanche. While you are reading this, its ecosystem is expanding, and its user base is increasing exponentially.

Avalanche launched its mainnet in September 2020. Its unique architecture ensures that it maintains its flexibility without compromising its decentralization or security. This technology is paired with a unique deflationary economic model. Similar to Ethereum which burns gas fees — permanently removing them from circulation — all AVAX used to post transactions to the blockchain are burned.

Avalanche is not a network of a single blockchain, but rather multiple blockchains:

1. Exchange chain or X-chain: This is used for creating and exchanging AVAX tokens and other digital assets on a peer-to-peer basis. It uses a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) mechanism to process transactions. The DAG data structure allows the network to process transactions in parallel. This system ensures high scalability.

2. Contract chain or C-chain: This chain resolves the biggest bottlenecks of congestion and empowers Avalanche to conduct 4500 transactions per second as opposed to Ethereum’s 15 transactions per second. C-Chain is Avalanche’s default smart contract blockchain. This chain implements an instance of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), allowing coders to fork over EVM-compatible DApps. It is fully compatible with the programming language Solidity. Solidity is mainly used for writing smart contracts on the Ethereum network. The C-Chain also uses a modified Avalanche consensus mechanism called Snowman. The Snowman consensus protocol builds on the Avalanche consensus protocol but orders the transactions linearly. This is beneficial when you are dealing with smart contracts.

3. Platform Chain or P-Chain: Simply put, P-chain is responsible for maintaining the Avalanche system. It is responsible for staking, validator coordination for different networks, and creating subnets.

Now that you’re completely sold on the scalability and potential use cases of Avalanche, let’s understand how it integrates with Router Protocol.

Integration with Router Protocol

With Router Protocol, users will now have the ability to utilize the true potential of the Avalanche network by performing cross-chain transfers and swaps between Polygon, BSC, and Avalanche C-chain.

To maximize the efficiency of this integration, we have taken the following measures:

1. As most of you know, Router has a built-in pathfinder algorithm that aggregates DEXes to find the best rates for cross-chain swaps. On the Avalanche side, we have plugged into Trader Joe and Pangolin — two of the most liquid DEXes on the network — to power cross-chain swaps. This allows us to support both transfers and swaps from day one.

2. As of now, there is very little liquidity for WMATIC on Avalanche, which could pose potential problems. Router will be deploying its own version of WMATIC on the Avalanche network to foster this liquidity.

While the integration of Avalanche is certainly a valuable milestone, our mission of providing a turnkey solution for true interoperability between every blockchain network is far from realized. Needless to say, our team is hard at work on multiple fronts. Apart from ironing out the existing kinks in our product offering, we have improved our product by:

1. Adding default token list.

2. New DEX Integrations: Post mainnet launch, we have integrated Quickswap and Sushiswap on Polygon, Apeswap, and Sushiswap on BSC, with more DEX integrations under the wings.

Moreover, we are working towards adding new functionalities to our product, like a cross-chain explorer and a well-documented Router cross-chain SDK. Furthermore, we are working tirelessly to integrate more chains ( Fantom, Arbitrum and other EVM chain integrations are in the pipeline) to make Router Protocol a one-stop destination for all cross-chain transactions.

For more information about Router Protocol, please visit our website and join us on social media.

About Router Protocol

Router Protocol is building a suite of cross-chain infra primitives that aims to enable blockchain interoperability between current and emerging Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains.

Website: http://routerprotocol.com/

Mainnet: https://app.routerprotocol.com/

Documentation: https://docs.routerprotocol.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/routerprotocol

Telegram: https://t.me/routerprotocol

Telegram announcements: https://t.me/router_ann

Discord: https://discord.gg/yjM2fUUHvN