If you follow WalletConnect or me on Twitter, you would’ve seen plenty of teasers on different features and properties of the v2.0 protocol. In this article we will break down every single one of them and the key differences from the previous v1.0 protocol.

The user experience will remain exactly the same yet the new protocol will break interoperability but for very good reasons. Here are the main features of WalletConnect v2.0 protocol introduces:

• Chain Agnostic Interface

• Multi-Chain Support

• Pairing & Session Separation

• JSON-RPC Permissions

• Improved Session Management

• Decentralized Message Relaying

Chain-agnostic interface

An often discussed, requested and misunderstood topic has been WalletConnect’s support for multiple blockchains. WalletConnect is first and foremost an encrypted communication protocol that only cares about two parties coming to agreement over a session.

However when v1.0 was released it made the assumption that both parties were communicating about any EVM-compatible chain thanks to chainId specified by EIP-155 standard but this meant that other blockchains like Cosmos and Polkadot would be incompatible given that their chains are not identifiable by the same standard.

Hence came the initiative back in 2019 to start CAIPs (Chain Agnostic Improvement Proposals) to provide a common ground for multi-chain applications. These standardize interfaces across different blockchain ecosystems which may not share tooling and infrastructure. CAIPs were developed together with projects on Ethereum, Cosmos, Polkadot, Solana, Near, Filecoin, etc.

Thanks to these newly defined standards that we developed in CAIPs WalletConnect v2.0 was able to expand its support very easily to be chain agnostic. Below you can find some examples of how accounts are specified for different chains.