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Much of the core business logic of sending and recieving tokens between chains is unchanged between IBC Classic and IBC v2. Some of the key differences to pay attention to are detailed below.

No Channel Handshakes, New Packet Format and Encoding Support

  • IBC v2 does not establish connection between applications with a channel handshake. Channel identifiers represent Client IDs and are included in the Payload
    • The source and destination port must be "transfer"
    • The channel IDs must be valid client IDs of the format {clientID}-{sequence}, e.g. 08-wasm-007
  • The Payload contains the FungibleTokenPacketData for a token transfer.
The code snippet shows the Payload struct.
The code snippet shows the structure of the Payload bytes for token transfer

Base Denoms cannot contain slashes

With the new Denom struct, the base denom, i.e. uatom, is seperated from the trace - the path the token has travelled. The trace is presented as an array of Hops. Because IBC v2 no longer uses channels, it is no longer possible to rely on a fixed format for an identifier so using a base denom that contains a ”/” is dissallowed.

Changes to the application module interface

Instead of implementing token transfer for port.IBCModule, IBC v2 uses the new application interface api.IBCModule. More information on the interface differences can be found in the application section.