A Casual Talk on Chain Abstraction: Is It Really More User-Friendly, or Just Another Buzzword?

Author: BRIDGET HARRIS

Compiled by: Shenchao TechFlow

Chain abstraction has become a hot topic, and the reasons are obvious—everyone in the cryptocurrency space should be excited about tools that make it easier for consumers to engage on-chain.

However, much of the discussion has not focused on how we got here. I believe it starts with the fact that developers are also consumers. Now, they are forced to make choices between different ecosystems, tech stacks, and communities. This creates a lock-in mechanism that sometimes diverts developers from focusing on the right issues due to improper and unsustainable incentive structures. Developers are also users, and they should not be forced to choose where to build.

One of the core challenges for developers is trying to integrate their applications with a plethora of different tech stacks and underlying infrastructures, or to build infrastructure that can work across various applications while dealing with community loyalty issues across ecosystems. Moreover, it feels like there are countless different standards in cryptocurrency, which does not help developers either.

(Image source: xkcd: Standards)

Historically, this has often forced developers to choose only one ecosystem to build in, and the creators of those ecosystems are aware of this, actively vying for developers' attention, leading to further lock-in and unsustainability. The result is that projects opt for half-hearted multi-chain scaling or dive deep into a single isolated ecosystem. Both have their issues, and chain abstraction aims to address these problems.

The ultimate goal of chain abstraction is simple: developers can deploy anywhere, as there is no longer a need to reach users; users can seamlessly interact across ecosystems, using any liquidity and any chain. Convenience is key, and the biggest beneficiaries may be those interfaces that aggregate user order flows (which are becoming increasingly centralized).

Chain abstraction as a concept is broad and loosely defined; some even consider it completely fictitious. Rather, it is just a collection of primitives, infrastructures, and tools that make operations easier for users and developers—many things fall within the scope of "chain abstraction." I align with the latter viewpoint while believing that these advancements are overall positive and necessary steps.

Below, I will provide a non-exhaustive overview of some companies building chain abstraction solutions and share my predictions for the future.

CEX as Part of Chain Abstraction

The most commonly used chain abstraction platform is probably Coinbase itself, although it is limited in the number of assets offered and is centralized. Through a single interface, users can buy and sell various tokens across different chains, albeit in a custodial manner. This is one of the main reasons Coinbase has achieved strong adoption rates and revenue, which is a good sign for the entire chain abstraction space. It proves that convenience has a market, and users value and are willing to pay for functionality and simplicity within a single interface.

Core Layer Infrastructure

For chain abstraction to truly take off, some believe a fundamental change is needed in the established standards within cryptocurrency. One such example is OneBalance, which is enhancing the existing JSON RPC (the industry standard in cryptocurrency) to allow new standards for applications to communicate directly with wallets. Their new API is essentially backward compatible with Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, and any assets and smart contracts on those chains. In addition to enabling transactions across three major chains, this architecture, known as the CAKE framework, also includes gas abstraction, social recovery, and authentication. Users benefit from fast state transitions, as solvers can request state transitions on the target chain without waiting for finality on the original chain. The ultimate goal is to integrate wallets, particularly Metamask, with their account model, allowing users to directly benefit from this new architecture. Specifically, this means users could theoretically purchase WIF with ETH at Solana's speed (rather than Ethereum's speed).

OneBalance's RPC method extension

Another company, Orb Labs, aims to be a provider that solves chain abstraction issues at the node level rather than at the account level. Their system consists of OrbyEngine (a smart RPC endpoint that can be used by wallets to aggregate and orchestrate account states across all chains) and OrbyKit (a dapp SDK that provides the same functionality for application frontends). OrbyEngine uses a combination of a universal intent protocol and a special node (called an account unified node) to aggregate and orchestrate account states.

In summary, they allow any wallet or dapp to achieve chain abstraction, gas abstraction, etc., with just five lines of code. This dynamic fundamentally changes how users interact with wallets, applications, and chains, so they no longer need to worry about bridging across ecosystems and manually moving assets. Chains simply disappear, as users can trade using all accounts and assets from other chains, regardless of where they are. This fundamentally alters the idea of wallets as mediums connected to specific chains, transforming them into chain-agnostic connection mechanisms that focus entirely on managing relationships between users, assets, and dapps.

NEAR is also on the core infrastructure side, having natively integrated chain abstraction into their L1. Through their chain abstraction stack, developers can:

• Immediately choose to subsidize gas fees for users, including cross-chain transactions via NEAR's multi-chain gas relayer.

• Utilize NEAR's multi-chain signature service, allowing users to transact on other chains using their NEAR accounts.

• Use FastAuth, enabling users to register (or recover) NEAR accounts using their email addresses, providing a familiar Web2 experience.

These primitives are crucial for providing developers with a more seamless experience, which positively extends to users through these types of stacks.

Unification Through Bridging

At a higher level, many bridging providers are exploring chain abstraction, with the most notable being Across. This protocol has a fully functional (released) intent engine, where transmitters compete for optimal execution paths to fulfill user orders.

Today, Across is the only real-time cross-chain intent-driven bridging protocol that works for both large and small amounts. The market is responding: Across has already processed nearly $10 billion in transaction volume and over 6 million transactions. Developers can also easily integrate their bridging abstraction framework Across+ into dapps, natively enabling chain abstraction. This serves as an early proof of concept for what chain abstraction can do and how the market evaluates it.

Socket and Bungee (a bridging aggregator) are also exploring chain abstraction solutions through modular order flow auctions, where users submit intents and solvers compete to fill them. Through SocketPlugin, developers can add a widget to directly integrate Bungee (Socket's bridging aggregator that supports cross-chain asset transfers) into their projects. Most of the time, Bungee is actually routed through Across, which accounted for about 50% of transaction volume by the end of June 2024. Across is cited as the cheapest bridge in Socket and other aggregators, accounting for about 78% of the time.

Integrated Interactions

In addition to bridging (and staking, minting, lending…), swapping is the most popular operation users perform on-chain, making it the largest TAM that projects can leverage. Platforms like UniswapX and Matcha focus on swapping, aiming to abstract away gas fees, aggregate liquidity sources for cheaper trades, and enable efficient cross-chain transactions. Typically, this involves some sort of solver that competes to fulfill order flows in the most efficient way. Solvers pay gas on behalf of the swapper, improving efficiency by batching orders together for better prices, allowing users to benefit from not having to worry about gas tokens.

Middleware Frameworks and Interfaces

Some teams are building layers that support these protocols. For example, Light could sit on the next layer of other cross-chain interoperability protocols (including potential Across, UniswapX…) and serve as middleware for user interactions with chain abstraction. Notably, Light supports any configuration—conditions, DCA, intent graphs, etc.—expressed across multiple chains within the EVM, while most intent-based protocols initially only supported limit orders. Additionally, Light uses order flow auctions, allowing users to programmatically define conditions, securities, and settlements for cross-chain transactions, helping to ensure optimal execution.

Another project in this space, Genius, is collaborating with Lit Protocol to build a chain abstraction solution, where Lit serves as the foundational signature scheme for Genius's liquidity architecture. Initially, they will support EVM, SVM, and Bitcoin, focusing on launching a decentralized transmitter and aggregating liquidity rather than going the intent route.

Intent as Part of Chain Abstraction

Intent often focuses on swapping, with the ultimate goal of allowing users to trade any asset across any chain without bridging. The following projects have recently caught my attention:

• Slingshot is an intent-based on-chain application that allows users to trade across different chains in a non-bridged, non-custodial manner. By creating an extremely simplified user experience—no gas tokens, no connect wallet buttons, no bridging, accessible on any device, one-click buy/sell—users are more willing to engage on-chain. The downside here is that users are ultimately limited by the amount of funds held in the treasury of each supported chain, but nonetheless, this architecture encourages more on-chain activity.

• Blackwing is developing a decentralized trading abstraction layer using Initia. Their advantage lies in enabling non-liquidation leveraged trading by using Uniswap LP positions as collateral. This effectively reduces the downside risk of significant losses while accelerating returns.

• Essential is developing its own intent-based Optimistic L2, where solvers propose their solutions directly in the form of new states. In this case, fraud proofs are very concise, as it only requires proving that a constraint has not been satisfied, which will be published to L1. Developers can directly leverage Essential's DSL (domain-specific language) to write applications with built-in intent frameworks, enabling a broader and more complex range of applications to exist and interoperate on their L2.

Achieving Mass Adoption Through Abstraction

Just as you can access any website regardless of which browser or operating system you are using, you should also be able to access any cryptocurrency ecosystem, no matter which chain it is built on. Moreover, developers should not be at a disadvantage for not being able to reach certain users in different ecosystems, regardless of the tech stack they use to build. Achieving this is undoubtedly easier said than done, but once realized, I believe it will be a significant catalyst for mass cryptocurrency adoption.

Pedro Gomes wrote on Twitter: chain abstraction is a shift in software design from "chain-centric" to "user-centric." It’s about making chains work for people, not teaching people to use chains.