• Blockchain platforms like Solana and Avalanche have faced multiple downtimes over the last year raising questions about their robustness.
•  IOTA’s Shimmer blockchain is emerging as a strong player as it seeks to become a universal bridge for all cross-chain transactions.

Ethereum Layer-1 competitors like Solana and Avalanche shot to fame during the crypto bull run of 2021, however, over the last year, these two networks have faced several downtimes. As a result, the crypto community has started raising doubts over how robust are these networks to handle a huge user base.

In a week’s time, the Avalanche blockchain network halted for the second time. Similarly, the blockchain network Solana also went down for the sixth time last month. However, in its latest report, the Solana Foundation has claimed that its blockchain network has shown strong resilience to validator client disruptions.

Over the last year, there’s been a major drop in the decentralized finance (DeFi) activity on Layer-1 platforms like Solana and Avalanche amid several downtimes faced by these networks.

As a result, DeFi players have been thinking of alternate solutions that can offer the protocol users a robust and seamless experience. There are some players that are working on this matter. IOTA’s Layer-1 staging network Shimmer is one such blockchain network looking to address the limitations of the existing platforms.

More About IOTA’s Shimmernet

Launched last year in September 2022, Shimmer is a staging network that also works as a testbed platform for testing new innovations within the IOTA ecosystem before bringing them to the mainnet.

Shimmer is a multi-chain platform majorly focused on flexibility, scalability, and interoperability. It seeks to provide the creation, connection and security of sovereign blockchains, applications, and ecosystems.

Also, Shimmer is a Tangle-based multi-asset ledger that allows everyone to mint their custom native tokens and NFTs. Shimmer’s DAG base layer is absolutely feeless, thus, any additional asset on Shimmer’s multi-asset ledger will be absolutely feeless and scalable.

The IOTA community has been eagerly awaiting the release of the ShimmerEVM protocol which would transform the Shimmer blockchain into a composable, scalable, and interoperable multi-chain network. It would make the Shimmer blockchain stand out from other distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) in the space.

Another key feature of Shimmer is tokenization which allows the minting and management of native tokens with zero fees.

Shimmer for Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

Alike other players, Shimmer allows the deployment of multiple smart contract chains atop the base layer. However, other market players usually suffer from fractionalization meaning that data silos can communicate with each other. The Shimmer Network solves this issue by wrapping L2 assets with L1 native assets anchored in the base chain.

This makes Shimmer a much most robust platform for effective data communication across smart contract chains while ensuring that there’s no leakage of data. The Shimmer blockchain seeks to become a universal bridge for cross-chain transactions and transfers.

It offers potentially limitless options for transfer and trade while reducing the need for L2 bridges. That’s how Shimmer can play a crucial role in servicing the DeFi industry in a robust and effective manner.