Recently, Textile announced on its official blog the launch of a new Bridges version , which has faster Bridge-to-Filecoin throughput and CID-based transaction queries! This means faster throughput from uploads, batches, transactions to on-chain Filecoin transactions.
What is Bridge?
Bridges (bridge, equivalent to the role of a cross-chain bridge) is an open protocol for permissionless off-chain storage from the blockchain . Enables developers and their users to start storing data from virtually any blockchain without any conversion, registration, developer token or secret exchange.
Data is stored on IPFS and Filecoin, so for those unfamiliar, Filecoin brings an incentive layer to decentralized storage with all the benefits of the IPFS stack, such as encrypted verifiable data, p2p data exchange, deduplication and more.
So what Bridges has is a way for decentralized application developers to easily and seamlessly store user data, application data, NFT assets, etc. Time to cite these figures no matter what they like.
What is the new Bridge version?
As we all know, Textile's focus has always been on ease of use. Their Bridges have a minimal API and are excited about how little code is required to integrate Bridges into existing decentralized application flows. But now that things are going well and the Textile team is starting to integrate Bridges into their apps and services, it's time to focus on throughput! Faster Bridge-to-Filecoin throughput, and CID-based transaction query!
Throughput is already on the rise due to the growing popularity of Bridges. But to facilitate it, we reduced the time that off-chain validators wait before sending uploaded data to auctioneers for Filecoin transactions. The auctioneer will also "fill" data (when needed) to make it more attractive to Filecoin miners. All in all, this has resulted in faster on-chain transactions . Of course, your data has been provided by IPFS the entire time, so even if the latency is "slow" to make it on-chain, your data is safely available on the IPFS CDN.
A more granular GraphQL query API, and two new default APIs .
Bridge SDK now supports query and retrieval by data CID. This feature is a bit of an understatement, so I'll repeat it here for clarity: you can now query Filecoin transaction status via a single IPFS CID! This means that the data you add via Bridge is now indexed by the upload CID and linked back to the transaction on the Filecoin network. For NFT platforms, this means that the data you upload through Bridge can be accessed through IPFS and Filecoin! Add that to the free storage you currently get with Bridges, and you have a powerful storage platform for all your NFT assets!
What is the next step?
The Textile team has been working with the good folks at The Graph to index cross-chain bridge contract states in Ethereum/Polygon and NEAR . Some of you may have seen The Graph's recent announcement about support for NEAR:
The Graph's upcoming integration with NEAR is a prerequisite for Textile's Filecoin Bridge system . We now have a true cross-chain indexing solution, allowing developers to build Filecoin-aware Dapps across the most important blockchains in the ecosystem.
Now the NEAR index can be tested on The Graph's hosting service. Textile officially announced on the blog that a Bridge subgraph will also be launched for people to try! Currently, it is very convenient to use Bridge. This update also speeds up the throughput, making this function more convenient and practical.