Particle officially announced the launch of the first chain abstraction trading platform UniversalX aimed at end users, officially entering the red ocean of on-chain trading platforms, which makes me curious about what chain abstraction + on-chain trading means.
My initial experience with UniversalX trading is roughly as follows: mixing all-chain liquidity without the need for bridging, very close to the CEX trading experience.
On the backend, UniversalX maintains the characteristics of Web3: user assets are self-custodied, publicly transparent, and non-reversible. This is the essential difference between UniversalX and Moonshot.
But on the frontend, users see the same extremely concise interface—selecting coins, entering amounts, one-click trading.
In this light, the target users of UniversalX actually cover the following groups:
-- MeMe players who enjoy discovering Alpha opportunities across multiple chains.
-- DeFi degenerates who enjoy pursuing passive income and executing arbitrage strategies across multiple chains.
-- Retail investors who enjoy CEX trading experiences but do not trust CEX asset management.
-- Non-Web3 native users who lack understanding of on-chain and multi-chain.
Compared to other MeMe trading tools on the market, UniversalX is clearly superior in security (DEXX users will deeply feel this).
So how should we view trading platforms like UniversalX and Infinex, which are native Web3 paradigms?
First, let's consider a meta question: what does the structural map of the future multi-chain world of Web3 look like?
For this point, different organizations/communities have different visions.
The vision of the Ethereum community is a parallel radiation structure of L1 + L2, with L1 as the settlement layer and L2 specialized to adapt to different application scenarios or community cultures.
The vision of the Solana community is to make Solana higher, faster, and stronger, becoming the most powerful hegemonic existence in the multi-chain world.
In the year 2023, which is seen as the year of L2, it seems that the vision of the Ethereum community is about to be realized. But in 2024, regarded as the year of Solana, the situation reverses, and the Solana vision becomes attainable. Currently, Solana leads in trading volume, active addresses, and other aspects, solidifying its advantageous position.
In the face of this changing environment, the Ethereum community should not hope that Solana's chain performance will quickly run out but should find effective new competitive strategies, just as it once suppressed EVM-compatible L1 with L2.
The version answer given by Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation is: BeamChain and Pectra upgrades. One aims to enhance the scalability of the consensus layer, and the other mainly serves chain abstraction, unifying the fragmented Ethereum ecosystem once again.
However, regardless of how Ethereum, Solana, and other Alt L1s attempt to define the future of Web3, the consensus in the industry is that 'the future will be a multi-chain world.' But no one wishes for this multi-chain world to be a series of isolated islands with fragmented accounts (addresses), interactions, and liquidity. Unified accounts, unified interactions, and unified liquidity are prerequisites for Web3 mass adoption. From a technical architecture perspective, we need to make the middleware invisible to developers and the infrastructure layer invisible to users.
This is actually the way a group of account-centered projects within the chain abstraction track is entering, represented by Particle Network's chain abstraction infrastructure, Universal Account.
Looking back in history, in every round of magnificent bull markets, the crypto market has been able to sell two very competitive products to traditional financial users: high volatility and high asset yield. For example, the last round's FTX mainly sold high volatility, while Celsius Network mainly sold high asset yield. Although both ultimately ended in collapse, the fault was not in the business model but in their centralized architecture.
So to some extent, UniversalX is equivalent to using a decentralized Web3 stack to build new products to re-validate the feasibility of the above business model. What happens when product + traction + business model aligns with a highly hyped narrative?
That's all.