Future plans and questions for CK tokens

Developers
1

Hi,

I’m looking at creating a platform on ICP and Ideally we’d need to have cross chain tokens for most of the major coins. ICP currently has some ck tokens but we’d like more. Given our situation we have some questions:

  1. Does dfinity plan to build more ck tokens like ckSOL or ckBNB etc? If so, what tokens and what is the timeline

  2. assuming dfinity will not build more ck tokens, how many people were involved in building ckETH and how long did it take? We’re trying to get an estimate for how long it would take to build out most of the other ck tokens given N developers per ckToken.

Thanks

1 Like
2

Hi! I’m a member of the cross-chain team at DFINITY. I’ll try to answer your questions:

  1. Yes, we are building more chain-key tokens. As part of our Dogecoin integration effort, we are planning to release ckDOGE soon. We didn’t build ckSOL because transactions on Solana are already fairly fast and cheap. If there is sufficient community interest, we’d certainly consider introducing this and other tokens.
  2. How long does it take to build a chain-key token? The answer is “it depends”. If it is an EVM-based token, it is (usually) straightforward and can be done with little effort in a short amount of time (hours to days). For non-EVM tokens, it can be arbitrarily complex. For example, implementing the Dogecoin integration, the foundation of ckDOGE, took several months despite the fact that we already have a working Bitcoin integration. The Solana integration required the development of a dedicated SOL RPC canister, which again took months to build.
    In short, if there is a decentralized mechanism already in place that enables canisters to interact with the target blockchain, then building a chain-key token for this blockchain usually takes little effort. If such a mechanism is missing, it will take considerably longer.
5 Likes
3

Thanks THLO. That has helped us quite a lot. Appreciate your thoughtful response.

All the best

4

Hardest part is translating blockchain signing. Took me a week to sign for kaspa…. Then there’s auditing and other stuff. But meat and potatoes is address generation and signing.

I think you should post a list of tokens you’re interested in.

In my opinion 1-2 weeks per token… cuz realistically you can combine everything into one framework or SDK, recycling similar functionality.

1 Like
5

It would be nice to have some kind of framework or library for all the common parts. So that only the transaction building, signing, etc. have to be put in. I understand that those parts are still hard and take time.

3 Likes