Kylin Partners with Astar (First to Achieve XCMP Pallet Calling!)

Kylin Network
3 min readJul 31, 2021

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Polkadot’s Cross-chain Messaging protocol, known usually as ‘XCMP’, is a game-changer. XCMP allows the realization of a key component of the Polkadot ecosystem, allowing consensus-based message passing between parachains and parathreads.
Thanks to Astar, XCMP is no longer conceptual: in February of this year, they collaborated with Acala to undertake a token transfer between chains. This successful ‘XCMP-lite’ implementation, however, was just the first step. Now, Kylin network is working with Astar to build on top of that work for the next evolution of the XCMP implementation and test out cross-chain calls for full functionality. In other words, calling a function that lives on another chain — one of the key foundational promises underlying Polkadot’s vision for XCMP.

This is groundbreaking stuff, it has never been done and we are using Chachacha to work with both Astar and a few of our partners to call each others’ technology.

What has been done?

Here at Kylin we have already made a great deal of progress and we validated calls across chains work, the next step is to do this on a network with far more parachains. The potential here is massive!

XCMP is normally a one-way message, essentially the chain sending an XCMP message cannot await a response. What we have done in Kylin is worked around that limitation by implementing a queuing system for requests, we then process those requests (from each parachain that requested it) in our OffChain worker and retrieve the requested data then send out the response. This is a much more efficient architecture because it is decentralized and essentially non-blocking, so the OCW call can take as long as it needs to and the parachains can just get on with producing blocks and receive the response when it’s are ready.

Below is a diagram visualizing the process….

Demo Time!

Mario, Sam, Dylan, and Maarten got together and did a demo and explainer about how this was achieved.

Watch it here ⬇️⬇️⬇️

What next?

We truly believe other projects can implement this architecture and we fully intend to stress test this in a multichain environment.

This is where our work on Chachacha comes in, we already have 6 projects committed to launching there. More details will be shared shortly

One more thing……

We believe our community is the most important part of what we are building. we will be incentivizing anyone willing to run the Kylin collator on Chachacha with 500 KYL for each month a collator has run continuously. This will be an excellent introduction for those of you interested in running your own validators when we get to mainnet.

This promotion will start soon and will continue till shortly after mainnet. Stay tuned for further details on this.

If your project would like to get involved please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

About Kylin Network

Kylin Network aims to build a cross-chain platform powering the data economy on Polkadot. It will be the data infrastructure for the future DeFi and Web 3.0 powered by Polkadot. Kylin Network will provide valid, reliable, secure, cost-effective, and easily-coordinated data sources and data analytics.

Contact Kylin Network

About Astar

Astar Network is a dApp hub on Polkadot that supports Ethereum and layer 2 solutions like ZK Rollups. Astar aims to be a multi-chain smart contract platform that will support multiple blockchains and virtual machines like EVM and WASM.

Contact Astar

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Kylin Network

Building a Cross-chain Platform Powering the Data Economy on Polkadot