World Mobile Token announced deepening its collaborative relationship with Input Output (IO) to develop a dedicated permissioned Cardano sidechain.

Micky Watson, the World Mobile Group CEO, said the move was necessary to comply with telecoms regulations. Further, as “such as solution doesn’t yet exist” on Cardano, the World Mobile Chain will be built using Cosmos’s open-source protocol Tendermint.

“We’re looking forward to collaborating with IOG on this project and work towards an interoperable future that will accelerate the shared vision that we have had since 2018.”

Cardano x Cosmos

The company has been working with the IO sidechain team on this project for several months. Once complete, World Mobile Chain will bridge the Cosmos and Cardano blockchains, opening up interoperability between the two chains.

“Through this technology initiative, the shared goal is to bridge a permissioned solution built on Cosmos’ SDK with Cardano’s public mainnet. This introduces new possibilities for interoperability between the Cosmos and Cardano ecosystems.”

World Mobile stated it had always envisioned “a multichain future.” Further, it was explained that telecom regulations require separate public and private data architecture to prevent sensitive customer data from being viewable on a public chain.

Cosmos is an ecosystem of blockchains that makes development easy by providing a “ready-made” network and consensus layer, leaving devs to focus on building the application layer. The company’s goal is to create an “internet of blockchains,” with each chain able to communicate in a decentralized manner.

This process is made possible by Tendermint, an open-source Proof-of-Stake protocol featuring a modular architecture that enables application development without significant changes to the core protocols.

“With Tendermint, you can create any blockchain system seamlessly. It helps to overcome the time-consuming technical setup phase so you can focus on the application itself.”

World Mobile is not leaving Cardano

A Reddit user asked whether this meant World Mobile is ditching Cardano in favor of Cosmos. It was explained that World Mobile is building a custom sidechain using the Cosmos software development kit. However, World Mobile transactions will still settle on Cardano.

Cardano sidechains follow “foreign events” and incorporate them into its state. As such, World Mobile Chain is essentially a smaller, independent, more centralized blockchain that links to Cardano. Like EVM layer 2 solutions, Cardano sidechains also comprise the mainchain’s technology, including security.

“A Cardano sidechain can implement many different consensus algorithms, ledger rules, execution environments, user facing APIs, and much more.“

World Mobile aims to utilize blockchain technology to provide internet access in areas lacking telecom infrastructure. WMT gained 7% on the news.