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

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

The new Gateway chain, announced on Mar. two, has been described as a cross-concatenation involvement rate market place that allows users to borrow assets that are native to one chain, such every bit Ethereum, with collateral from another concatenation, such as Polkadot or Celo. Compound Finance originally appear the platform in December 2020 when it was chosen 'Compound Chain'.

Compound aims to convalesce current fragmentation in the DeFi manufacture across different blockchains with Gateway and has called the next-generation blockchain architecture, Substrate, to practise then.

Substrate, which also powers the Polkadot network, is a modular framework that enables developers to create purpose-congenital loftier-throughput blockchains. Compound founder Robert Leshner explained the option of blplatform in the blog mail service:

"We chose Substrate and then that we could focus on building application code, instead of inventing consensus algorithms; it'due south a modern framework built on a mod 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 eolith an asset every bit collateral. Leshner elaborated that Starports are the "glue" that connects a blockchain to Gateway, and they tin can exist mixed and matched in various combinations for different networks.

Gateway will also have a native unit of value called Cash which volition 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'south Ropsten network as a testnet, and audits will be carried out before the mainnet launch, though no date was specified for this.