Compound to offer cross-chain borrowing via Gateway

Decentralized finance lending protocol Compound has unveiled a new blockchain that will enable cross-chain collateral.

It is the latest move to mitigate expensive operations on the Ethereum network and enable more interoperability in the DeFi ecosystem.

The new Gateway chain, announced on Mar. 2, has been described as a cross-chain interest rate market that allows users to borrow assets that are native to one chain, such as Ethereum, with collateral from another chain, such as Polkadot or Celo. Compound Finance originally announced the platform in December 2020 when it was called ‘Compound Chain’.

Compound aims to alleviate current fragmentation in the DeFi industry across different blockchains with Gateway and has chosen the next-generation blockchain architecture, Substrate, to do so.

Substrate, which also powers the Polkadot network, is a modular framework that enables developers to create purpose-built high-throughput blockchains. Compound founder Robert Leshner explained the choice of blplatform in the blog post:

“We chose Substrate so that we could focus on building application code, instead of inventing consensus algorithms; it’s a modern framework built on a modern language, Rust.”

To complement Gateway, Compound is planning to build ‘Starports’ which would function as on, and off-ramps, to the new blockchain for users to borrow or deposit an asset as collateral. Leshner elaborated that Starports are the "glue" that connects a blockchain to Gateway, and they can be mixed and matched in various combinations for different networks.

Gateway will also have a native unit of value called CASH which will standardized value across various disparate assets and be used to pay transaction fees. CASH will also be earned by liquidity provision and network validators.

Gateway is currently running on Ethereum’s Ropsten network as a testnet, and audits will be carried out before the mainnet launch, though no date was specified for this.