The blockchain industry has matured significantly over the past decade, but one challenge remains: interoperability. Indeed, with thousands of blockchain networks currently operating in isolation, the ability to securely and efficiently exchange data and assets between blockchains remains critical.
Today, the Smoot and Harmonia communities are excited to announce they’ve consolidated code bases to strengthen blockchain interoperability for enterprises. Harmonia, an LFDT lab, will merge into Smoot, an LFDT project that serves a modular, reusable, vendor-agnostic interoperability framework. This consolidation creates a unified solution for enterprises and regulators. It also marks a significant step forward in unifying blockchain interoperability.
What Is Smoot?
Contributed to LFDT by Wanchain, Smoot’s primary purpose is to enable seamless communication and interaction between different blockchain networks—both homogeneous and heterogeneous chains. Designed to be compliant with the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA)’s DLT Interoperability Specification, Smoot ensures enterprise-grade interoperability.
Smoot features a three-layer architecture:
- The Smoot Messaging Layer, which facilitates the secure exchange of data between distinct decentralized networks while ensuring data integrity and validity at every step.
- The Smoot Function Call Layer, which enables the uninterrupted execution of operations across multiple distinct decentralized networks, removing barriers between chains.
- The Smoot Application Layer, which orchestrates complex logic and workflows across distinct decentralized networks, unlocking unified cross-chain experiences.
By supporting decentralized networks with diverse underlying technologies and multiple off-chain relayers, like multisig, MPC, ZKP and light clients, Smoot avoids the fragmentation caused by conflicting vendor implementation and protects against vendor lock-in.
What Harmonia Brings to Smoot?
A lab initially contributed to LFDT by Adhara and R3, Harmonia focused specifically on regulated blockchain interoperability. Harmonia was originally created to support the growing number of enterprise blockchain networks operating in regulated environments, including Fnality and HQLAx. These networks often use different blockchain technologies and must comply with strict legal and regulatory standards. Harmonia helped ensure that these networks can interoperate securely and compliantly, by fostering a shared understanding of constraints and solutions.
Importantly, Harmonia gathered contributions from industry leaders like Adhara and R3, including:
- Design principles and best practices for regulated environments;
- Protocol definitions, sample code and libraries; and
- Extensive documentation capturing industry-specific requirements
Integrating Harmonia adds these insights into the Smoot framework, strengthening its ability to service enterprises operating in regulated industries.
Smoot + EEA Specification: A Strategic Alignment
The EEA DLT Interoperability Specification, an open standard published by the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance to define how different blockchain networks can securely and efficiently interoperate, especially in enterprise and regulated environments. The specification is maintained by the EEA Crosschain Interoperability Working Group, with contributors from Wanchain, Adhara, MIT, Algorand, Stellar, and others.
Smoot is fully compliant with the EEA DLT Interoperability Specification, making it a reference implementation of the standard. This alignment ensures:
- Open-source neutrality: Smoot avoids vendor lock-in and promotes community-driven development.
- Cross-ecosystem compatibility: Smoot can bridge public and private blockchains, supporting enterprise-grade use cases.
- Scalability and flexibility: Developers can reuse Smoot’s modular components across different networks with minimal changes.
As stated by Redwan Meslam, Executive Director of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, Smoot exemplifies the pragmatic, interoperable frameworks that the EEA aims to promote for enterprise Ethereum adoption.
Get Involved with Smoot
As a LF Decentralized Trust project, the Smoot community is open to all. We invite blockchain developers, enterprises, corporations, consortiums, industry alliances, and anyone else to participate in the growth of this project. There are many ways to get involved:
- Join the Smoot Technical Steering Committee;
- Contribute to the Smoot codebase;
- Support the Smoot community; or
- Leverage Smoot in your products.
Find us on the #smoot-general channel on Discord or at our community call on every other Wednesday. Explore the code and engage with Smoot on GitHub.