a16z: 2024 Bull Market Trend "Seamless User Experience"

As the on-chain world continues to develop towards a multi-chain trend, the crypto industry has become increasingly prosperous. However, this multi-chain trend is also exacerbating the island effect. Dapps need to continuously expand horizontally to capture users across multiple chains, while users must deal with the poor experiences brought about by fragmentation in order to obtain a more comprehensive trading experience. This includes having to create an account on each chain and navigate cumbersome cross-chain operations, as well as enduring fragmented liquidity, among other issues.

Georgios Konstantopoulos, a researcher and partner at the top crypto investment firm Paradigm, has also criticized the Asset + Chain model on the X platform, stating that this model is a significant reason for the loss of on-chain users. He also proposed the idea of "thinking for users, rather than making users think."

Solving the dilemma of the Asset + Chain model and reconstructing the user experience is becoming one of the most关注的加密趋势 in 2024. Recently, the well-known crypto investment firm a16z published an article titled "Big Ideas 2024," offering insights into the trends in the crypto industry for 2024. Can Seamless UX break the fragmentation dilemma of Asset + Chain?

Fragmentation Issues of L1/L2 under the "Asset + Chain" Model

In the continuously evolving multi-chain ecosystem, developers face numerous challenges, such as non-unified tools. Users, on the other hand, are limited by decentralized applications ("dApps") on specific chains, leading to further fragmentation of liquidity and less user-friendly UI/UX. Bridging the interoperability gap between chains has become a core solution for the development of Web3.

1. Liquidity Fragmentation:

With the rapid development of high-performance blockchains and zkEVM (Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine), liquidity between chains is gradually becoming fragmented. This poses efficiency issues for users, making it challenging to hold or trade assets across different blockchain ecosystems.

2. Poor Interoperability Experience and Security Risks:

Traditionally, the token trading process between multiple chains is cumbersome and costly, involving complex cross-chain underlying protocols between different assets. This unfriendly user experience often hinders many users from further exploring new DeFi projects and dapps.

Can Intent-Based Trading Break the "Asset + Chain" Dilemma?

In the Asset + Chain model, when users want to complete a transaction, they not only need to think about the transaction itself but also how to achieve the optimal solution across different paths. For example, if my assets are on the Arbitrum chain and I want to trade on the Avalanche chain, I first need to consider how to cross-chain my assets (taking into account optimal rates, efficiency, and security), and I may also need to find the best trading path within the Avalanche application.

Naturally, in today's Web3 development landscape, intent-centric protocols are seen as one of the solutions to the Asset + Chain dilemma.

Intent-Centric can be understood as "intent-based." In the article "Intent-Based Architectures and Their Risks" published by Paradigm on June 1, 2023, the concept of intent is explained.

For users, they only need to express their intent, and the related protocols/applications of Intent-Centric will handle the rest, matching execution paths. The execution operation is summarized as being handled by a Solver, which is responsible for matching the execution path that aligns with the intent, ultimately waiting for the final execution and obtaining the result. Transaction = I specify how to execute; Intent = I just want this result without focusing on the implementation process.

In the Web2 world, the concept of "intent" has already reached a high level, with examples including internet-based online services, smart driving, and even ChatGPT.

Web3 is an early-stage field, and the native characteristics of crypto make the use of on-chain facilities very challenging. Additionally, the island effect between chains and applications is severe. Therefore, intent narratives aim to fold and abstract the complex process of realizing intent, creating a new qualitative change in user experience. Clearly, this is an important driving force for the evolution of application forms in the Web3 world, and this narrative will be key to capturing users from outside the Web3 world.

Currently, dappOS, positioned as a "Web3 operating protocol," has established a new intent trading framework, becoming one of the promising examples to break the Asset + Chain dilemma.

How Does Intent-Centric dappOS Break the "Asset + Chain" Dilemma?

1. dappOS's "Intent Trading" Framework: Unified Account + dappOS Network

The dappOS operating protocol includes a unified account system based on account abstraction and an automated execution network, dappOS Network. The distributed service nodes in the network can help users execute complex trading operations on their behalf, such as gas payment, cross-chain transactions, and finding optimal trading paths.

The unified account system is also favored by centralized exchanges like OKX. OKX improves user efficiency and capital utilization by unifying various independent accounts, such as fiat accounts, crypto accounts, leveraged accounts, and perpetual accounts.

dappOS has created a unified account on-chain. The dappOS Account, based on dappOS Network and built on account abstraction, allows users to achieve a CeFi-like user experience while ensuring decentralization. In addition to supporting account resets through Web2 account features, it also enables users to manage multi-chain assets through a unified account.

Users can manage and integrate multi-account assets through the dappOS unified account. For instance, when a user's account holds assets across multiple chains, they no longer need to worry about which chain the assets are on or switch between different networks, achieving abstraction from accounts to chains.

2. Seamless Integration with Hot Ecosystems, Becoming a New Traffic Distribution Endpoint in the On-Chain World

Recently, the decentralized derivatives protocol GMX announced its integration with dappOS V2 and will jointly launch an incentive program. Specifically, the dappOS unified account allows users to directly manage the total amount of multi-chain assets, achieving balance universality and supporting any asset to pay GMX execution fees and gas fees, completing associated orders with a single signature. Multi-chain users on ETH, Optimism, BNB, etc., can seamlessly interact with GMX without manually cross-chaining to the Arbitrum and Avalanche networks. Complex operations that previously took 15 minutes have been simplified to a one-click purchase of GLP/GM assets, with gas fees reduced by 20%.

In September, dappOS launched its new v2 version, and protocols such as Benqi, Perpetual Protocol, and QuickSwap have completed integration, achieving significant growth through the seamless experience and traffic distribution system created by dappOS.

In terms of seamless experience, users can interact across multiple chains simply through the dappOS Wallet account, lowering the barrier for users to enter new public chains. For example, lending assets on Benqi on the Avalanche chain; opening contracts on Perpetual Protocol on Arbitrum; swapping and LP mining on QuickSwap on Polygon; and conducting swap transactions on Manta Network's Layer 2 network, Manta Pacific.

The low-barrier operational experience has also injected valuable traffic into various public chain ecosystems, making dappOS a new traffic distribution endpoint in the on-chain world. Since the launch of dappOS v2 in September, it has accumulated over 38,000 sticky users. Projects integrated with dappOS have also captured a significant number of users in a short period.

According to data released by dappOS, the leading lending project in the Avalanche ecosystem, Benqi, saw an increase of 4,848 new users and 28,571 transactions two months after integrating dappOS. The new dappOS users deposited a total of $12,877,782, with USDT and USDC accounting for 18.17% and 16.62% of the total deposits in the BENQI protocol, respectively. The new dappOS users borrowed a total of $7,199,765, with WBTC and WETH accounting for 80.57% and 45.75% of the total borrowings in the BENQI protocol.

Perpetual Protocol, after integrating with dappOS v2 in September, added 17,200 sticky users in the first month, with transaction numbers increasing by 89,900. To date, Perpetual has maintained a good level of user activity, especially with dappOS Perpetual showing impressive active user data.

Recently, amidst the popularity of Bitcoin inscriptions, dappOS community users reported receiving Christmas airdrops ranging from 10 to 1000u and mysterious invitation codes. Community users speculate that the invitation code may be used for the inscription minting of dappOS collaboration projects.

3. dappOS Interaction Examples and Evaluations

On dappOS, I conducted interaction evaluations with the Manta Pacific network and the Avalanche native DeFi protocol Benqi. Interested readers can click on this link to learn about detailed interaction tutorials and evaluations.

Conclusion

Positioned as a "Web3 operating protocol," dappOS is a good example of user-centric thinking. It is promoting the transition of the on-chain world from fragmentation to unity through a new account abstraction and chain abstraction solution. With dappOS, on-chain traders can enjoy convenient trading services similar to CeFi, and on-chain applications can achieve seamless combinations in new ways. For instance, Benqi can achieve seamless integration with Perpetual Protocol through dappOS v2, enabling one-click expansion of lending + derivatives. On-chain applications will no longer be dominated by a single narrative direction. As a new on-chain traffic distribution endpoint, it plays a crucial role in breaking the barriers between public chains, dapps, and users, facilitating seamless connections among these roles, and helping emerging public chain ecosystems capture a significant number of users in a short period, achieving rapid growth.

The Web3 operating protocol represented by dappOS is breaking the fragmentation dilemma of Asset + Chain through seamless user experiences.

In the upcoming year of 2024, in addition to solutions that create seamless user experiences, what other crypto trends are worth paying attention to? Crypto users may find inspiration from the eight other major crypto trends listed by a16z, including entering a decentralized new era; the rise of modular technology stacks; the combination of AI and blockchain; play-to-earn evolving into play-and-earn; when AI becomes game creators, cryptocurrencies provide guarantees; formal verification becoming less formal; NFTs becoming ubiquitous brand assets; and SNARKs becoming mainstream. However, the crypto market changes rapidly, and beyond the references provided by leading institutions like a16z, users need to conduct their own research.