Author: Bridget Harris, Founders Fund investor; Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou
Chain abstraction has become a hot topic right now, and for obvious reasons — everyone in crypto should be interested in tools that make it easier for consumers to participate in on-chain activities.
But a lot of this discussion misses the question: How did we get to this point in the first place? I have always believed that developers are consumers - now they have to choose between different ecosystems, technology stacks, and communities. This creates a lock-in mechanism, and sometimes developers are diverted from the problems they need to focus on due to unreasonable and unsustainable incentives. Developers are users too, and they should not be forced to choose where to build.
A core challenge for developers is trying to integrate their applications with a bunch of different technology stacks and infrastructures — or building infrastructure across applications — and dealing with community loyalties across ecosystems. It doesn’t help that there are seemingly countless standards in the crypto space.
Historically, this has often forced developers to “pick just one” ecosystem to build on — ecosystem creators know this, and actively compete for developer attention, leading to further lock-in and unsustainability. As a result, projects either choose half-hearted multi-chain expansion, or rush into isolated single ecosystems. Both have problems, which chain abstraction is (hopefully) working to solve.
The end goal of chain abstraction is simple: developers can deploy anywhere — because user contact is no longer important — and users can interact seamlessly across the ecosystem (any chain, any liquidity). Convenience is welcome, and the biggest beneficiaries are likely to be the (increasingly integrated) interfaces that allow users to submit order flows.
Chain abstraction is a broad concept with no strict definition, and some even consider it a completely false concept. Chain abstraction is nothing more than a set of primitives, infrastructure, and tools that can simplify the work of users and developers - a lot of work can fall into the scope of "chain abstraction". I agree with the latter view, and at the same time, I think these advances are generally necessary steps for the positive development of the industry.
Below, I’ll briefly introduce several companies working on chain abstraction solutions and share some of my predictions for the future.
1. CEX as a subset of chain abstraction
The most commonly used "chain abstraction" platform is probably Coinbase - despite the limited number of assets it offers and the fact that it is a centralized exchange. Users can buy and sell a variety of tokens across different chains through a single interface, albeit in a custodial manner. This is one of the main reasons why Coinbase has such massive adoption and revenue, and it bodes well for the entire chain abstraction space. It proves that convenience is popular, and users value and are willing to pay for functionality and simplicity in an interface.
This theme has permeated many different decentralized protocols, each of which aims to simplify one or more on-chain steps for users and developers.
2. Core layer infrastructure
In order for chain abstraction to truly prevail, some argue that fundamental changes to established standards in crypto are needed. One example of this is OneBalance, which is enhancing the existing JSON RPC (crypto industry standard) standard in a native way so that the new standard allows applications to interact directly with wallets. Their new API is inherently backwards compatible with Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, and all assets and smart contracts on these chains. In addition to transacting across the three major main chains, this architecture - the CAKE framework - also includes gas abstraction, social recovery, and identity authentication. Users can benefit from fast state transitions because solvers can request state transitions on the target chain without waiting for finalization on the source chain. The ultimate goal is for wallets, especially Metamask, to integrate their account model so that users can directly benefit from this new architecture. Specifically, this means that users can theoretically use ETH to purchase WIF at the speed of Solana (relative to Ethereum).
Another company, Orb Labs, aims to be a chain abstraction provider that solves the chain abstraction problem at the node level rather than the account level. Their system consists of OrbyEngine (a smart RPC endpoint that wallets can use to aggregate and reconcile account states across all chains) and OrbyKit (a dapp SDK that provides the same functionality for application frontends). OrbyEngine uses a general intent protocol and special nodes called account unification nodes to aggregate and reconcile account states.
In short, they allow any wallet or dapp to implement chain abstraction, gas abstraction, etc. with as little as five lines of code. This fundamentally changes how users interact with wallets, applications, and chains, so they no longer need to worry about bridging across ecosystems and manually transferring assets. The "chain" just disappears, because all accounts and assets on other chains can be used for transactions regardless of where the user is. This fundamentally changes the idea of wallets as a medium to connect to a specific chain, turning it into a chain-agnostic connection mechanism that only focuses on managing the relationship between users, assets, and dapps.
NEAR is also on the core infrastructure side, with chain abstraction natively integrated into NEAR L1. Through its chain abstraction, developers can:
Immediately choose to subsidize user gas fees — this includes cross-chain transactions through NEAR’s multi-chain Gas Relayer.
Using NEAR’s multi-chain signature service, users can use NEAR accounts to conduct transactions on other chains.
Using FastAuth, users are given a familiar web2 experience and can register (or recover) a NEAR account using their email address.
These primitives are key to providing a more seamless experience for developers, which is then actively extended to the user end with what is created with these types of technology stacks.
3. Unification through bridging
Going one level higher, there are many bridge providers working on chain abstraction - the most famous of which is Across. The protocol has a mature (delivered) intent engine, and relayers compete to complete user orders through the best execution path.
Today, Across is the only live, cross-chain intent-driven bridging protocol that actually works for bridges big and small. The market has responded: Across has processed nearly $10 billion in volume (over 6 million transactions). Developers can also easily integrate their bridge abstraction framework Across+ into dapps to achieve native chain abstraction. This is an early proof-of-concept that demonstrates the power of chain abstraction and how the market values it.
Socket, the maker of Bungee (a bridge aggregator), is also developing a chain abstraction solution through modular order flow auctions (users submit intents for solvers to compete). Through SocketPlugin, developers can add a widget to integrate Bungee (Socket's bridge aggregator that supports cross-chain asset transfers) directly into their projects. Most of the time, Bungee is routed through Across, and as of the end of June, Across's traffic share reached 50%. Compared with Socket's other aggregators, Across is considered the cheapest bridge most of the time.
4. Integrated swap
Swaps are the most popular action users perform on-chain, surpassing bridging (as well as staking, mining, lending, etc.), and are therefore the largest TAM that projects can tap into. Platforms such as UniswapX and Matcha focus on swaps, aiming to abstract gas, aggregate liquidity sources for cheaper transactions, and enable efficient cross-chain transactions. Typically, this involves a class of solvers competing to satisfy order flow in the most efficient way. Solvers pay gas on behalf of swappers, improving efficiency by bundling orders together to compete for better prices, without users having to worry about gas tokens.
5. Middleware framework + interface
Some teams are building support layers for these protocols - for example, Light could sit as a layer below other cross-chain interoperability protocols (potentially including Across, UniswapX, etc.), acting as middleware to provide support for the chain abstractions that users interact with. Interestingly, Light supports any configuration, across multiple chains expressed within the EVM, while most intent-based protocols only support limit orders, at least initially. In addition, Light uses an order flow auction mechanism, where users can programmatically define the conditions, security, and settlement of cross-chain transactions, which helps ensure best execution.
6. Intent as a subset of chain abstraction
The intent is particularly focused on swaps, with the ultimate goal of supporting users to trade any asset on any chain without the need for a bridge. The following projects have caught my attention recently:
Slingshot is an intent-based on-chain application that allows users to transact on different chains in a bridgeless, non-custodial way. By creating an amazing user experience that is extremely simple - no gas tokens, no wallet-related buttons, no bridges, login on any device, and one-click buying and selling - users are more willing to participate on-chain. The downside is that users are ultimately limited by the amount of funds held in the vaults of each supported chain, but regardless, this architecture encourages more activity across more chains.
Blackwing is developing a decentralized trading abstraction layer powered by Initia. Their advantage is to provide traders with no-liquidation leverage by using Uniswap LP positions to guarantee margin positions. This greatly reduces the downside risk of major losses while increasing returns.
Essential is developing their own intent-oriented optimistic L2, where solvers directly propose their solutions in the form of new states. Fraud proofs are concise here, as incorrectness can be proven by showing that a constraint is not satisfied, which is then published to L1. Developers can directly leverage Essential's DSL to write applications with a built-in intent framework, which enables a wider and more complex set of applications to exist and interoperate on L2.
7. Achieving mass adoption through abstraction
Just like you can access any website no matter what browser or operating system you are running, you should also be able to access any crypto ecosystem no matter what chain that ecosystem is built on. Developers should not be disadvantaged by targeting certain users in a different ecosystem, no matter what technology they are building on. Getting this to happen is certainly easier said than done, but once it happens, I believe it will be a much larger catalyst for mass crypto adoption.
