This ICP course is a fast-paced, hands-on guide designed for engineers with an Ethereum background to quickly grasp smart contract development on the Internet Computer Protocol.
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Our goal is to streamline your learning journey towards proficiently utilizing ICP’s Chain Fusion Technology, an innovative approach that allows ICP smart contracts to seamlessly communicate with external blockchains such as Ethereum, Bitcoin, and soon, Solana.
We have structured this course such that it leverages your existing knowledge of the EVM as foundation to accelerate your learning curve.
ICP smart contracts**,** also known as Canisters, have the capability to securely and autonomously read from and write to EVM-compatible chains (e.g. Ethereum, Optimism, and Polygon) using Chain Fusion Technology (CFT).
Leveraging this feature, there are a variety of functionalities that can be built such as co-processors, bridges, and ICP smart contracts capable of holding multiple tokens across various blockchains.
Some popular implementations of the Chain Fusion Technology are of ckBTC, ckETH and ckUSDC. These are the digital twins or “wrapped tokens” of BTC, ETH and USDC replicated on the ICP network using CFT. An advantage is that you can trade the wrapped Bitcoin (ckBTC) and wrapped Ether (ckETH) cheaply on the ICP Network as well as gaining access to the liquidity of Ethereum and Bitcoin.
Chain Fusion Technology opens up a pathway for creating cross-chain DeFi applications, multi-chain marketplaces, cross-chain governance systems, and numerous other use cases. Check out the existing protocols built on top of CFT: Chain Fusion Ecosystem.
Soon, Chain Fusion Technology can be used to communicate with the Solana network after their next Helium Milestone.
One of the final projects you'll be developing in this tutorial is a cross-chain bridge powered by Chain Fusion Technology. This will enable you to bridge ERC-20 Tokens from one EVM chain to another or into ICP. All performed securely through an advanced cryptographic protocol called Threshold ECDSA as well as ICP’s unique feature called HTTP outcalls. Don’t worry about the heavy use of ICP jargon; we’ll break it down and understand the details step-by-step.