Chain Abstraction
Understanding chain abstraction, the ultimate solution to Web3's fragmentation.
The need for chain abstraction
Chain abstraction: A user experience exempt from the manual processes required to interact with multiple chains.
Web3 has evolved significantly in the past few years.
Scalability is almost a need of the past. We’ve gone from an ecosystem of monolithic, siloed networks to a modular landscape of highly abundant blockspace, with hundreds of L2s and application-specific blockchains.
Meanwhile, Web3’s user-facing technologies have grown as well. Applications can now cultivate friendlier user experiences thanks to account abstraction, wallets tied to social logins, and improved ecosystem-wide wallet interoperability.
As a result of both above developments, building sustainable and scalable dApps has become easier—and a more pressing need—than ever.
Yet, as these innovations have emerged, one problem has grown across the industry: the fragmentation of users and liquidity across chains.
Symptoms of fragmentation
As more blockchains emerge, Web3’s fragmentation will also worsen, creating all sorts of problems for the ecosystem. This includes issues like:
Blockchains devoting a high percentage of their resources towards incentivizing end-users to bridge away from other ecosystems.
Users dealing with balances scattered across multiple chains, with incurring in costly and frequent bridging to unify them.
Developers doing redundant work to keep up with Web3’s expansion, constantly re-deploying dApps on new chains.
Users’ liquidity constantly spreading across an ever-expanding number of networks, leading to inefficient usage.
Misaligned incentives for attracting new users.
As defined above, chain abstraction tackles these problems directly by creating an experience exempt from the manual processes required for multi-chain interaction. In a scalable, cheap-to-use ecosystem and with the advent of chain abstraction, the next evolutionary step of Web3 is upon us.
Blockchain Paradigms: Evolution
A chain-abstracted ecosystem is non-negotiable
In a Web3 that embraces chain abstraction, users can simply interact with any application. More importantly, they can do so without paying attention to infrastructural details, such as dApps’ underlying blockchains.
This is akin to Web 2.0, where applications process high volumes of data without users’ explicit knowledge. Consequently, a chain-abstracted experience requires cross-chain asset transfers to happen unbeknownst to users, allowing them to purely interact with the application at hand—not its infrastructure. This naturally extends to an experience where users don’t need to worry about other components of the user experience, like gas payments, the need to swap assets to acquire chain-native assets, etc.
In essence, chain abstraction is all about bringing Web2’s UX simplicity to Web3.
Understanding chain abstraction
Layers of chain abstraction
Given that chain abstraction is an experience rather than a specific technology, it is not defined by any singular solution. Rather, it exists as a stack of modular, interoperable technologies that collectively eliminate all manual operations from users’ experience across multiple chains.
This stack comprises:
Blockchain-level chain abstraction
Collectives of blockchains with shared security, communication, bridging, or other attributes that create intrinsic or improved interoperability, creating architectural parity across chains. For example, Polygon’s AggLayer, Avail Nexus, and the Optimism Superchain would be considered within this category.
Account-level chain abstraction
Solutions that unify user accounts across the ecosystem, enabling the usage of a single balance across any chain. This category exists to bring chain abstraction directly to users across all applications, removing the need to bridge, manage multi-chain balances, or experience other typical points of friction that arise from a fragmented ecosystem. This category comprises solutions such as Particle Network’s Universal Accounts and NEAR’s chain signatures.
Application-level chain abstraction
Orchestration protocols and frameworks that allow developers to build applications that seamlessly interact with any chain. Whereas account-level chain abstraction breaks users from the confines of distinct chains, application-level chain abstraction does this for developers. Solutions within this category include Agoric’s Orchestration API and Socket’s MOFA protocol.
Collectively, solutions inhabiting the aforementioned layers and categories enable a “total implementation” of chain abstraction, fully removing both users and developers from the confines of specific chains or ecosystems.
Multi-layer chain abstraction implementation: End result
Degrees of comprehensiveness
Going a step further, solutions that fit within these layers can be further understood by their degree of separation from end-users and developers, dictating their comprehensiveness. This categorization includes:
Comprehensive solutions
Projects that individually tackle several challenges contributing to the vision of chain abstraction, such as cross-chain asset management (bridging or the lack thereof), account aggregation, interoperability, and so on.
Orchestration solutions
Solutions centered around allowing developers to trigger and execute cross-chain operations directly from their applications.
Foundational solutions
Infrastructure that focuses on solving individual, granular problems rather than multiple of them at once. Such problems may include message passing, asynchronous execution, intents, or any other vital components of chain abstraction.
Chain abstraction: Integration depth
Foundational technologies
Chain abstraction’s technological foundation relies on various infrastructural components, including intent frameworks, interoperability solutions, account abstraction, and so on.
These solutions each independently target one or more manual processes that can be removed from users’ experience via chain abstraction.
Let’s further elaborate on them:
Intents
Intent technology seeks to create ways for users to better express their goals within an application, which then discovers the best way to execute them. Chain abstraction solutions can then be constructed using intents for transaction routing and execution.
Interoperability
Interoperability solutions, such as Arbitrary Message Bridges, play a foundational role within chain abstraction. Alongside intent systems, interoperability infrastructure can enable efficient cross-chain communication. If intents and related systems handle execution within the chain abstraction stack, interoperability solutions handle communication.
Account abstraction
Closer to end-users than the two above components (although also often integrating them), account abstraction is the base technology for many account-level chain abstraction solutions. Account abstraction enables sequences of operations to be bundled within a transaction, facilitating complete cross-chain transaction flows with one signature.
Foundational solutions:
Roots of chain abstraction
