We recently published a blog post on Chimera Chains, a feature of Anoma’s Typhon ordering and execution engine.
Chimera Chains generalize shared sequencers. They use a consensus based on Heterogeneous Paxos to simplify cross-blockchain atomic transactions for chains with overlapping trust models.
This forum post is for discussion of the blog post.
Transactions committed to the chimera chain are final. They do not then have to “make it to the base chain.” However, chimera chains have a different notion of “committed” for each base chain. The atomicity guarantee is the guarantee that the base chains’ “commits” agree.
I’m not sure about the router analogy. Chimera chains are for atomic cross-chain transactions. “Traditional” analogues are atomic cross-database transactions, which are also hard. Asynchronous messaging between chains feels a lot more like routing, and can be done with IBC.