A bridge-style functionality makes the Humans Blockchain Web3 ready by facilitating the communication between two distinct blockchains and enabling assets to move freely between them.
Humans.ai has made it its mission to bring artificial intelligence into the Web3 era by employing blockchain technology to address some of the friction points that revolve around the ownership, governance, control and monetization of AI. Based on Cosmos SDK, the Humans Blockchain lays the foundation for an ecosystem tailored to fit the needs of AI development and management. But we are just scratching the surface of this new ecosystem for AIs with a twist.
“Cosmos SDK is a good starting point for any blockchain as it provides all the necessary modules to get your network up and running. But we are a tech company at heart, so we want to make the Humans Blockchain more than just a ledger that records transactions. We want it to be an ecosystem that will house and execute the AI of the future. Not only that, we envision it as an interconnected and interoperable framework for artificial intelligence, so ensuring the compatibility of the Humans Blockchain with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and the development of the Humans Synapseare significant steps towards this direction.”, stated Vali Malinoiu, Head of Blockchain & Infrastructure at Humans.ai.
Decentralized governance alongside distributed services and applications are core tenets of the emerging Web3 era, which blockchain gracefully achieves through its complex inner workings, cryptographic mechanisms, and consensus protocols. But there still is a missing piece of the puzzle. One ingredient that makes blockchain fall short of the Web3 ideal, and that is or was, to be more accurate, the lack of interoperability.
The Humans team develops a new product — the Humans Synapse, which enhances the functionality of the Humans Blockchain ecosystem by making it interoperable with the Ethereum blockchain and others like Hedera, Avalanche, and Polygon. The Humans Synapse enhances the Humans Blockchain with the ability to natively support token transfers from the Ethereum Blockchain and the Humans Blockchain and vice versa through a feature called interchain accounts.
“Our Blockchain Synapse is designed to benefit our community first and foremost. Through this module, we make the Humans Blockchain more versatile, innovative and asset friendly because we establish a direct link with a blockchain outside the Cosmos ecosystem. With a few clicks, users can bring their $HEART tokens into our blockchain to interact with AI products”, said Humans.ai’s Head of Blockchain.
Why are blockchain portals a path toward Web3?
Blockchain ranks as one of the most valuable technologies that have hit the market in the past decades. Its value is generated by its ability to ensure complete trust and ownership in the information it stores. This is why its most potent use case remains cryptocurrency. With its capacity to ensure trust between untrusted participants, blockchain effectively removes the need to rely on central authorities and middlemen to perform audits and verifications like in traditional systems. Through this unique approach to trust and the granular ownership it enables for digital assets, blockchain has cemented its legacy as an enabler for decentralized finance.
As groundbreaking as blockchain is, it comes with a prevalent shortcoming that has acted as a fundamental challenge for the community to overcome since its inception — the lack of interoperability. By design, blockchains are siloed systems, self-contained ecosystems that cannot connect or operate with other similar networks. For example, imagine for a second that a blockchain is an island. There are two islands in the middle of the ocean (an analogy for the digital world). One is Humans.ai, and the other one is Ethereum.
The main drawback is that the two islands have different languages and customs and cannot communicate with each other or exchange assets. This is where the aptly named “Synapse” comes into the equation. It’s a blockchain portal that acts as the missing link between two blockchain ecosystems, making the transfer of information and assets between them fairly easy. In our example, the portal developed by Humans will facilitate the transfer of $HEART tokens and other information between the Hedera, Polygon, Avalanche, Ethereum blockchains and the Humans Blockchain and vice versa using the same Metamask address.
By acting as a direct link between the Humans Blockchain and other blockchains, the Humans Synapse will enable members of the community who have $HEART tokens on Ethereum to migrate them to our ecosystem and use them to interact with artificial intelligence products.
A closer look at the Humans Synapse
“A major advantage of the Humans Synapse is that it falls in line with blockchain’s philosophy of decentralization. It’s decentralized by design, meaning we do not own the entities that control the portal. Delving a bit into the more technical aspects, our blockchain portal is multi signature-based, which means that signers, elected by our validators, are the ones who sign the transactions that move the tokens from one blockchain to the other”, stated Vali Malinoiu.
One of the primary innovations of the Humans Synapse is that it is decentralized, unlike traditional blockchain bridges available on the market, which are centralized. Centralized bridges, also referred to as custodial or trust-based, require users to place their trust in a central entity that owns and operates the communication system. The drawback to this type of bridge is that users give up control of their cryptocurrency if they want to convert it into cryptocurrencies from another chain.
Non-custodial/trustless bridges like the Humans Synapse operate in a decentralized manner, relying on smart contracts to manage token transfers and validators who check and approve the transactions. This added layer of complexity makes the transfer process more secure and resistant to vulnerabilities. An added benefit of the Humasn Synapse is that it enables users to use their Metamask address on the Humans Blockchain. With this feature, users own native tokens and seamlessly perform swaps through interchain accounts.
The Humans Synapse leverages CosmWasm to ensure smart contract functionality. On the Ethereum side, the system will employ traditional smart contracts based on Solidity when performing token transfers.
The Humans Blockchain will also use Cosmos’ Inter Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC) which will connect the Humans.ai ecosystem with other blockchains from the Cosmos ecosystem. One blockchain the Humans team plans to connect with is Osmosis to create a new liquidity pool for the $HEART token. This suite of technologies directly benefits the Humans community because it will enable them to exchange $HEART with any token from the Cosmos ecosystem without needing the services of a centralized exchange.
From a functionality perspective, the Humans Synapse will act as a wrapped asset bridge and an interchain bridge. Wrapped asset bridges enable token interoperability between two distinct blockchains, in our case Hedera, Polygon, Avalanche, Ethereum blockchains and the Humans Blockchain. In contrast, interchain bridges provide interoperability between blockchains.
Interchain Accounts provide access to all IBC-enabled Cosmos chains. This means that blockchains from the Cosmos ecosystem can access applications, features and services of other blockchains and carry out actions native to that particular blockchain. The result is a radically enhanced user experience and composability to blockchains that leverage Cosmos.
A quick guide to the Humans Synapse
Interaction with the Humans Synapse is designed to be as simple as possible. If a user wants to transfer, for example, an asset from Ethereum to the Humans Blockchain, he needs to:
· Log in with Metamask
· Once logged in, her assets are detected. It’s similar to making a deposit at a bank. If you make a transfer between two banks, you have two IBAN accounts, a source, and a destination. In this example, Ethereum represents the source, the address that you sign with Metamask, and the destination is the Humans address that you sign with Kepler
· This process also works vice versa
· Kepler is the most popular wallet used in the Cosmos ecosystem.
