Although the mention of chain abstraction in the Chinese market is not very high, there are still quite a few participants or potential participants.
XION is one of the earlier protocols to enter the chain abstraction track in the market, and its current overall progress is still in the test net and pre-TGE stage.
This article mainly introduces its overall design and some extensions of track views within my cognitive framework.
I hope this article gives you a more intuitive understanding of the chain abstraction track.
(This is a long-term track research series~)
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(1) The Entry Process of XION
(2) Solution Details
(3) Payment Concept Promoting XION?
1. Entry Process🔻
First of all, I think it is necessary to say how to enter XION. I personally experienced and registered, and it is actually just two simple steps:
(1) Email Registration
(2) Email to Receive Registration Code
If there is no XION account, a prompt will pop up to create one, and after the creation is complete, you can enter to browse some of the current test net panels.
(3) Completion
However, during the exploration process, I am not sure if it is a problem with my device, but every time I enter a new application, I need to log in to my account again via email, as if the webpage or the ecosystem itself is very independent, lacking even a brief memory of information.
To be honest, this adds quite a bit of complexity to the actual experience, and in the end, it's unclear whether there will be a more one-stop access experience.
2. Solution Details🔻
The overall solution details of XION, besides basic account abstraction, are worth mentioning its foundation for a multi-chain environment and the uniqueness of on-chain GAS fees.
(1) The Foundation of the Multi-Chain Environment
XION can be viewed as a chain abstraction solution within the Cosmos ecosystem, utilizing the Comet BFT consensus and inter-chain communication protocol (IBC) at its core, providing support for multi-chain environments and instant settlement.
I personally believe that one standard for judging whether a chain abstraction solution is worth long-term attention is: does it support multi-chain scenario applications?
In principle, an L1 can improve user experience in a similar way, ultimately achieving the goal of abstracting technical complexity.
This can certainly be called chain abstraction, but the overall development trend of the industry currently is multi-chain parallelism, and the isolated situation of liquidity dispersion will not be improved.
Unless all L1s suddenly reach a consensus to do this, it is still more efficient to leave it to specialized chain abstraction solutions.
(2) Using USDC as GAS Pricing
I think one of XION's major features is to use USDC as a unified fee pricing on-chain, and many may wonder about this pricing: whether it will impact the supply and demand model of XION's future token issuance, in my view, it absolutely will not.
This is easy to understand because XION has an automated trading pool of XION/USDC placed in the backend, where frontend users consume USDC and the backend pool automatically trades it for XION.
This design reduces certain complexities of transactions while still preserving some demand for native token scenarios.
More intuitively, because XION belongs to the Cosmos ecosystem, the support for pricing transactions on-chain comes from the Cosmos ecosystem's Osmosis (a multi-chain DEX in the Cosmos ecosystem).
Actually, I have questioned this issue a long time ago in my on-chain use: why not hide the DEX in the backend and promote the automated conversion of GAS.
Especially for some ETH L2, this question remains unanswered~
3. Payment Concept Promoting XION
The design of using USDC as GAS raises a question from a stricter perspective: we first need to understand what USDC is and how to obtain it.
This may not be very favorable for some who are just getting into Web3, or as a first contact point for new Web3 users, because chain abstraction itself is doing this—allowing new users to enter Web3 with as little understanding and technical friction as possible.
However, USDC has a high adoption rate in the industry, and also has a strong compliance background and regional characteristics, which may become one of the main driving factors in the development process of XION.
(Background: Using USDC as GAS does not mean obtaining support from the underlying issuer. Prior to this, XION established a strategic partnership with Circle (the issuer of USDC).)
Moreover, Circle's venture capital department has independently participated in XION's strategic round of financing.
Recently, the rise of the payment concept has led to a lot of discussion. In my view, this resembles a new round of 'bond issuance' movement by traditional payment giants. For Web3 and our industry participants, what needs to be focused on is where these 'debts' ultimately flow and who the bearers are.
Reflecting on specific events, it is about where these new entrants' stablecoins are issued, who the issuers collaborate with, and where the final resource inclination lies.
I believe that the chain abstraction solution itself can be visualized as a 'conceptual bridge' linking Web2 and Web3, and XION is a new cycle infrastructure solution chosen by Circle as a major stablecoin issuer against this backdrop.
The underlying basic conditions can be said to be a combination of chain abstraction and the choice of mainstream stablecoin issuers.
As an L1, many people still have a one-sided understanding that it just created a wheel in the market, but my understanding of chain abstraction itself is that it binds together the existing wheels in the industry to make the Web3 vehicle run faster, better, and more stably.
Even if some chain abstraction solutions have architectures as an L1, such as XION mentioned in this article, and the popular Particle in the chain abstraction track, they cannot be understood as a single universal monolithic chain.
(However, the architecture of XION's monolithic chain seems relatively distinct, or the documentation does not specify, but in any case, it can achieve multi-chain scenario usage for users due to IBC.)
This article serves as a research on chain abstraction cases. Prior to this, I have also introduced views on other chain abstraction tracks, which can be directly jumped to for reading:
