The Interlay interoperability project has been selected to receive a grant from the Web3 Foundation to continue its work on Polkadot. The money will be used to develop a parshain on Polkadot which will connect to the Bitcoin blockchain (BTC).
According to the March 5 announcement, Interlay is one of the recipients of the Web3 Foundation’s fifth wave of grants, which was deliberated in the first quarter of 2020.
The Web3 grant program funds teams and projects aimed at improving Polkadot in various contexts. Each grant is up to a maximum of $ 100,000 and is linked to the execution of specific proposals, although the foundation does not disclose the final amounts awarded for each.
The funding is primarily for software developers who are building infrastructure for Polkadot. The main areas of interest for the software are parachins and integration with other projects, testing tools, new portfolios and user interface development.
The foundation will also fund research efforts on security, benchmarking and the Polkadot protocol, as well as educational initiatives.
Interlay project
Interlay is defined as an interoperability project for decentralized finance (DeFi). He developed an interoperability framework called Xclaim in order to create assets saved one by one on different chains. The company has been working on an independent implementation of the Xclaim blockchain since 2018.
Xclaim relies on “guaranteed intermediaries” to facilitate the transfer of funds from one chain to another. The system also allows users to become “their own middleman,” in the same way that atomic trading would work.
The developers claim that Xclaim is “95% faster and 65% cheaper” than atomic swaps based on Hash Time Locked contracts (HTLC).
Polkadot progress
The Polkadot project is led by Parity Technologies, a company co-founded by Gavin Wood, who previously co-founded Ethereum (ETH). It aims to be an implementation of a fragmented and interoperable blockchain, in direct competition with the Ethereum platform.
The project made the news of several high-level integrations of actors of the ecosystem mainly oriented towards Ethereum. On February 25, he announced an integration with Chainlink to provide oracles based on Polkadot – a key feature to activate DeFi.
A few days earlier, a strategic collaboration with Celer Network had been announced to bring its secondary layer 2 channels to Polkadot.
With the Interlay grant, it seems that the project has now set itself the goal of bringing Bitcoin in too.