The founding partner of Dragonfly is also concerned about what the concept of "chain abstraction" is

Original Title: "Why Chain Abstraction Is the Next Frontier for Web3"
Original Author: Illia Polosukhin
Original Compiler: Luccy, BlockBeats

Editor's Note:

In the current development trend of Web3, chain abstraction has gradually become a topic of great interest. Since its establishment in 2018, the NEAR ecosystem has been striving towards the vision of chain abstraction.

NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin explores the concept of chain abstraction in this article and details NEAR's tech stack, emphasizing the importance of chain abstraction for enhancing the usability, discoverability, and security of Web3. Illia Polosukhin points out that the NEAR tech stack has expanded to support comprehensive chain abstraction for cross-chain and various applications. BlockBeats compiles the original text as follows:

Most dapps today are not truly decentralized applications. If users need to leave the application before using it, then it is merely a frontend and not a real application. If users have to manually join and manage multiple accounts through trading platforms, deal with multiple gas fees, and bridges, have you really built an application? I don't think so—this might explain why only a few million people in the world are using dapps.

Because we believe in a more open, decentralized internet that supports individual sovereignty and is beneficial to the global community, if we want to see Web3 gain broader adoption, we need to take action.

The prevailing idea in today's Web3 is modularity, which separates different functional layers of blockchain, such as settlement, data availability, and execution, to improve scalability. L2, optimistic and ZK rollups, data availability layers, sidechains, and state channels are all examples of modular solutions.

The massive emergence of blockchains and rollups has led to a decline in user and developer experience. The existence of modularity and numerous chains has resulted in liquidity, applications, and users becoming more fragmented, creating a rather complex situation for user experience that ordinary users find hard to adapt to. The same goes for developers, who feel forced to commit to specific tech stacks, limiting the audience for their applications. Now, when you build a dapp, by choosing a single chain, you are essentially locking yourself into a niche market.

I want to propose a better vision for the entire Ethereum ecosystem and Web3: let’s work together to drive mainstream adoption through chain abstraction. The idea is that blockchains must be abstracted away from users so that they do not hinder user entry or participation. NEAR has been focused on this vision since 2018 and has now become the network with the most users in Web3: with 12.4 million monthly active users and a total of 34 million users.

Here’s how we can integrate Web3 and attract billions of users through dapps.

What Does This Look Like for Users?

Let’s imagine what using a dapp should be like: easily trading across different networks, conveniently navigating between different experiences, all done within a single interface. For example, Alice picks up her phone and opens KAIKAI from her lock screen. She orders a smoothie from a local merchant and discovers a discount at her favorite clothing store, Maison, in the app, so she orders a pair of spring shoes. Alice finds that she has earned enough KAICHING rewards to get a badge at Maison, unaware that it is an NFT on Polygon, and redeems it in her account.

Later that day, while browsing Maison on the KAIKAI app, she notices that her new badge reveals a ticket discount for an exclusive event at the store, featuring a DJ she likes. She buys 2 tickets with KAICHING, still unaware that it is an NFT on Arbitrum. Since she has an extra ticket, Alice invites her friend Bob to join her and asks for his address.

Bob sends his NEAR address to Alice and opens his app to check the tickets. He sends Alice some ETH to thank her for the invite and looks at the different cryptocurrencies in his account. Since he has some time on the subway, he decides to buy some BTC and lend USDC so he can mint a Fighting Dragon NFT on Magic Eden. His friend Charles had texted him earlier about buying one so they could battle each other’s dragons in NEAR’s new game "Year of the Dragon," where their dragons could fight for each other’s coins.

All these interactions and transactions can occur in a completely private manner within a single interface. No wallets, no network switching, and no transaction fees to deal with; these are all embedded directly in the exchange or purchase and handled on behalf of the user. Alice doesn’t need to worry about which network the tickets are on, and Bob can send her ticket payment in any cryptocurrency he wants, easily buying other cryptocurrencies in the next moment. All of this happens within a single application. This is the level of seamlessness we should strive for as an ecosystem.

How Do We Achieve Chain Abstraction?

Everyone building applications in Web3 will benefit from access to such a broad potential user market as illustrated in this example—anyone using the application. Today, developers choose a network based on access to liquidity or users of a specific rollup or chain, but in the future of chain abstraction, they can simply build using the best technology. Users will increase for the best experience.

Imagine if Gmail users couldn’t send messages to Outlook addresses; that would be nonsensical, and the same goes for Web3 addresses. The core assumption of chain abstraction is that end users do not care about the underlying blockchain. They just want the applications to work properly. In reality, blockchains are just the infrastructure that derives value from Web3: securing assets from seizure, economic opportunities, removing intermediaries in transactions, global permissionless identity, data provenance, entertainment experiences, and more.

The core goal of chain abstraction is to integrate the increasingly fragmented modular landscape of Web3. While this will be most apparent at the user experience level, this integration of liquidity and accounts benefits from innovations at the security level.

Zero-knowledge (ZK) introduces a fundamentally new approach to ledger security. Previously, people had to trust a decentralized set of validators; now even a single computer can prove that rules have been followed with a simple proof. This means that developers were either forced to build on shared chains or spend enormous resources launching a new chain; now they can simply launch one on their single server.

This new paradigm introduces the concept of cross-settlement: as more chains become fully provable (ZK provable), if certain proofs are published on other chains, that chain cannot be revoked without needing to revert to the other chains. Through ZK proofs, transactions from one chain can also be settled on multiple other chains. This provides mesh security, as all proofs are continuously aggregated, allowing assets to move securely between these chains.

To achieve unified security, two things are needed at the bottom of the stack: data availability, which provides a way for everyone to synchronize while the operator is offline, and a mechanism for decentralized ordering for applications without centralized operators.

The next layer is identity with unified security. Users can have one address across all possible chains and freely move assets between them. From the user’s perspective, this should be a single account where they can interact with applications on different chains, and assets can be automatically bridged or swapped.

I call this "account aggregation." NEAR will launch the next version of FastAuth in March 2024, which will have the capability to map NEAR addresses to EVM, Bitcoin, and other addresses. NEAR accounts can request signatures for transactions on another chain. This allows them to build multi-chain applications directly on NEAR as smart contracts.

The final layer is the unified experience layer, or application layer (e.g., DapDap), which provides a way to interact with applications across various chains without requiring users to switch or leave a single interface. A decentralized frontend can provide easily buildable components in a chain-abstracted manner. NEAR can achieve this through NearJS, combining data indexing and decentralized frontends—V2 will also be launched in March 2024.

How Does NEAR Achieve Chain Abstraction?

Since its establishment in 2018, the NEAR ecosystem has been striving towards the vision of chain abstraction, focusing on usability, a flexible account model, and a highly scalable blockchain to support mainstream applications with billions of users. Today, the tech stack has expanded to support comprehensive chain abstraction for cross-chain and various applications.

• Scalable integrated blockchain that can grow to over 1 billion active accounts daily.
• Secure aggregated tech stack, including NEAR DA, zkWASM (in collaboration with Polygon Labs), and rapid finality provided by EigenLayer.
• Account aggregation on top of this, allowing transactions across all chains using a single account.
• A data layer that supports querying data from holistic, integrated, modular, private, and permissioned chains to predictable protocols.
• Intent relayers that can execute complex intents across chains using this infrastructure.
• A decentralized frontend that provides multi-chain discovery and composability, forming a unified experience.
• A super (application) wallet that is user-friendly and provides a way to browse all of Web3 without having to switch networks or deal with gas tokens and bridges.

Importantly, these layers support builders from across Web3, including Ethereum, rollups, L2s, and more chains that are becoming part of the future of chain abstraction.

Conclusion

2024 is the year to hide the complexity of multi-chain infrastructure to provide a Web3 experience. Improving usability and discoverability while addressing liquidity fragmentation and security trade-offs should be the top priority for all Web3 builders.

Let’s make chain abstraction a movement. The NEAR ecosystem invites builders from across Web3 to take full advantage of the solutions we offer and collaborate with us to build more chain abstraction solutions together.

Special thanks to Zaki Manian for the discussions and comments that contributed to the publication of this article.