For anyone who followed the work of the Unlock Labs team over the years, it should be clear that we always focused heavily on making it easier for both crypto native and non-crypto native users to use the products and the protocol: from our Unlock accounts, to our support for credit cards, but also QR codes to prove a ticket’s validity or even the ability to “swap and pay” or our support for cross-chain payments and governance.
In fact, at Unlock, we understood very early that there would be many currencies (we added support for ERC20 locks in June of 2019!) and multiple chains (we added support for xDAI, now known as Gnosis Chain, in March 2021, and we now support 15 chains!). Later, when we added support for cross-chain payments to our checkout, we stumbled upon relay.link and its APIs, finding the perfect match for our needs. Even though I had known Peter for years (we were part of a group of crypto founders in NYC as early as 2017!), we got to meet the rest of the team, and we quickly became excited to join forces with them!
Relay is building the cross-chain payment solution that the blockchain space needs. Our vision is that, eventually, most monetary transactions — ranging from large bank transfers to grocery purchases, online memberships, and event tickets — will be powered by crypto, across hundreds or thousands of networks and even more currencies. Relay already offers an easy swap UI that supports many chains (EVM, Solana, Bitcoin…), and all popular flavors of coins (including stablecoins), but we also offer a powerful API-based integration used by OpenSea, fun.xyz and others, like Unlock, of course :)
Given our experience, joining Relay was the obvious next step on our journey, and the Unlock team is working on “decentralizing” Relay. Our goal is to design and build a protocol that would offer the same excellent developer and user experience while allowing third-party entities to contribute their own expertise, filling the user’s needs whether it is by providing their own capital, their ability to find the most price-efficient routes, or even to “package” transactions in blocks.
In fact, we’ve already started: a few weeks ago, we shipped Relay Vaults, a mechanism that helps the Relay team rebalance our funds more quickly from one chain to another, while offering yield to LPs who are willing to contribute some of their funds.
What about the Unlock Protocol? For the last few years, the Unlock Protocol has been wholly owned and controlled by the Unlock DAO. Stella and other DAO members have been pushing forward third-party developer contributions, marketing efforts, and even financing initiatives… In other words, we have achieved complete decentralization, which was always our goal, and the Unlock Protocol is now a public good. I am, of course, still a contributor and an active DAO member, and I look forward to seeing even more projects built by the community!