What’s Cooking in Chain Abstraction
Essential Focus Areas in Solving High and Low-Level Chain Abstraction
“Chain abstraction is bullshit.” You’ve heard it now as many times as I have, but it wouldn’t be one of our industry's most well-funded subjects if it wasn’t controversial. In this article, I make the case that chain abstraction is in fact, not bullshit, and like Josh Bowen’s “we’re all building the same thing” tour, I posit that many modular infrastructure projects are all building toward the same thing: a chain-abstracted future.
Before we begin, however, we want to thank our partners, Particle Network and Everclear for helping us put this series together, and making it all possible.
Setting the stage:
Before we begin, let's recount what we discussed in my last article. The mission of chain abstraction is to build blockchain-based experiences that look and feel like the internet we use today. We get there through the development of two symbiotic focus areas: high-level and low-level chain abstraction. High-level chain abstraction deals with all the work that goes into improving how users experience casual app surfing across networks. Low-level chain abstraction, however, concerns the technical leaps that will allow developers to build applications with their preferred tools without subsequent isolation to a single network. Making cross-chain experiences feel more unified and resemblant to the internet we use today will position blockchains to be stronger and more suitable foundations for the next generation of the internet. Solving chain abstraction is the precursor to any hope that web3 will become the next evolution of the internet.
I covered a non-exhaustive list of user and developer experiences that contribute to both high and low-level chain abstraction. This list includes:
High level:
No technical hurdles that prevent or disincentivize users from jumping between their favorite apps on various chains
Low latency
Universal gas standards with reliably low or no fees
Ability to use the same wallets with minimal or no lift from the user to switch networks
No liquidity imbalances limiting what can be done in DeFi
Encrypted activities and no exposure to toxic-MEV
Low level:
Unified execution environments.
More reliable code compiling
In this article, I’ll identify and explain what I believe to be the specific focus areas contributing toward solving high and low-level chain abstraction and bringing us closer to the future that we’re all building toward.
What’s Cooking in Chain Abstraction
High and low-level chain abstraction is being tackled in a multitude of ways. Here are the focus areas that are the most pivotal to the materialization of chain abstraction:
Composability
Composability is the ability of smart contracts to be able to write to the state of other smart contracts – they are connected and can compose actions between each other. For blockchains to share composability, they must either share consensus, a sequencer, or a block builder; shared block production allows contracts on one chain to compose with contracts on different chains. Composability is critical within applications where state updates depend on the state of other contracts on different chains, such as cross-chain lending and borrowing where the execution of an action is dependent on the state of contracts on multiple chains.
Composability can be achieved across blockchains in a few different ways, with the three leading approaches being sharing consensus, a sequencer, or a blockbuilder. Sharing at least one of these elements allows for the atomic inclusion of transactions, which is the guarantee that if one transaction is included in a block on rollup A another subsequent transaction will be included on rollup B simultaneously. Atomic inclusion is critical for cross-chain contracts to compose with each other efficiently as the coordination of contingent transactions requires real-time synchronicity.
To learn more about composability and how experts in the chain abstraction world are building toward it, I recommend checking out Espresso, Astria, and Nodekit.
While composability is one of the biggest design opportunities for blockchains, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever reach a point where every chain will share composability. So, for the outlier chains that will never share composability, verifiable interoperability is mandatory. Let’s explore this.
Verifiable Message Passing and Canonical Asset Bridging
For blockchains that will likely never share composability, verifiable cross-chain message passing and canonical asset bridging is mandatory.
General message passing (GMP) across chains - whether assets or state data - is incomplete without zero knowledge proofs (ZKPs). ZKPs are an essential part of GMP protocol designs so that two protocols don’t have to trust - but can verify - each other’s consensus. ZKPs prove state transitions on one chain and can be used to trigger subsequent actions on different chains – such as the locking of a bridged asset on Ethereum that prompts the minting of a wrapped asset on Solana. On chains that share composability - contracts can write to and from the state of other contracts to trigger cause-and-effect actions natively, but without shared composability, contracts should not automatically trust the state of contracts on other chains.
Verifiable message passing is an essential part of the chain abstraction stack to ensure that cross-chain protocol communications are dependable for an internet of applications to be built on top of them. Union is one of the leading teams building ZK interoperability with IBC and light client-based bridging, which allows them to verify consensus across chains as well as offer bridging for canonical asset transfers. This means that Union’s partner protocols can trustlessly transfer native assets like USDC and general data across any IBC-connected chain.
Verifiable message-passing protocols like Union are building toward a chain-abstracted future with a plug-in approach leveraging light client-based IBC connectivity. Verifiable message passing, liquidity aggregation, and unified state proving are also being delivered more native to protocol designs through aggregation layers like the Polygon Agg Layer.
Polygon’s AggLayer has risen as another solution for unifying interoperability, liquidity, and verifiable state transition standards. The AggLayer seeks to connect a network of L1s and L2s that can interoperate with each other irrespective of Ethereum’s 7-day challenge period for fraud proofs to facilitate real-time communication without embedded delays. The Agglayer makes real-time communication possible by coordinating bridge contracts between all supported chains, meaning that all AggLayer-connected liquidity can be transferred between each chain upon demand. ZK proof aggregation is also a feature of the AggLayer, where connected chains can leverage Polygon’s provers and verifiers for efficient proof generation and bundle all proven state transitions into one coordinated proof that is sent to Ethereum. Polygon lowers the barrier to entry for chains to become ZK rollups by providing a standard architecture under the AggLayer and amortizing the cost of proof verification among all AggLayer chains.
The adoption of cross-chain verifiable message passing will be critical to a chain-abstracted future for two major reasons. Firstly, developers will be able to coordinate verifiable communications between interrelated applications on non-composable chains, and second, new chains benefit from lower barriers to initial liquidity bootstrapping.
Some additional impacts of verifiable message passing and canonical bridging protocols like Union outside of DeFi include the ability to transfer native NFTs across multi-chain gaming applications and identity solutions that rely on the cross-network collection of reputation, attestations, or unique identifiers can function more natively wherever they’re being used.
Low Barrier, Unified Wallet Experiences
For chain abstraction to be meaningfully grasped by users, the most tangible and rewarding experience to optimize is at the wallet level. There have been many pushes to lower the barriers to wallet adoption and make wallet user experiences more sticky. The biggest problems with the most widely adopted wallets today include:
Securely managing seed phrases. This is an unfamiliar experience for new users altogether, where improper management leads to the hacking of millions of dollars of user assets per year.
Managing different wallets for different blockchains. Many new chains with next-generation VMs come with the need to manage additional wallets.
Needing to manually switch chains when signing into apps on various chains.
The most impactful efforts so far towards making wallet experiences easier is through account abstraction. Let’s review four features that account abstraction gave to users that previously weren’t possible:
Elimination of seed phrase reliance: users can now benefit from managing account security with 2FA, biometrics, or usernames and passwords. These are friendly approaches to securing accounts that feel more like traditional internet account management, not something new and scary like private keys and seed phrases. Poor seed phrase management accounts for millions of dollars worth of asset theft yearly.
Wallet Programmability and Account Permissions: This allows for the programmability of asset ownership, allowing crypto wallets to feel more like real-world wallets where multiple people can use funds – external addresses can be permitted to spend certain amounts of assets within certain time frames. This would be important in a circumstance where a parent gives their child a weekly allowance of spending X amount of money on in-game assets - the parent owns custody of the assets but the child is programmably permitted to spend only their weekly allowance of the parents’ funds.
Separation of wallet signing and contract execution for gas subsidization and transaction bundling:
Account abstraction allows for gas subsidization within protocols and apps. This is made possible by separating the signing and execution of transactions - where the signing of transactions can remain delegated to users’ existing wallets, while the execution of transactions can be delegated to a smart contract wallet. In cases where applications or protocols are designed to support gas subsidization, smart contract wallets can be funded with gas by external wallets so that the user doesn’t need to worry about managing gas tokens on different chains before using them.
Transaction bundling is also possible with account abstraction, where users can order the execution of multiple transactions at once within one signature. This allows users to execute multi-step intents in just one motion, such as approving a token to be swapped by a DEX and then immediately staking or providing liquidity for a dex pair with the ending token balances.
Between lower barriers to entry in managing wallet security, programmability of wallet controls, gas subsidization, and multi-transaction bundles, account abstraction will be one of the most impactful elements of chain-abstracted experiences in future blockchains and application designs.
Beyond account abstraction, I want to highlight two additional mission-critical features in a chain-abstracted world: multi-VM-supporting wallets and universal gas tokens.
While the EVM is the most widely adopted execution environment for blockchains, next-generation VMs such as the SVM, MoveVM, and WASM are becoming more widely adopted, and as such, wallets should add support for VMs outside of the EVM while also removing the need to switch between networks. If a network is supported by the wallet, the sign-in process should be frictionless and not require users to manually switch networks. VM agnostic wallets that allow users to interact with many chains with as little friction as possible are critical for onboarding and retaining net-new and less sophisticated users to blockchains. Differences in VM or chain support should never be problems users have to consider - and the answer is never another wallet for them to manage.
Lastly, while protocols and applications catch up with their economic strategies around gas subsidization, universal gas tokens are an important intermediary solution. Introduced by Particle Network, universal gas tokens can be used within intent-based networks (more on this below) to afford the execution of cross-chain transactions without having to worry about owning the gas token of each individual blockchain. Gas fees are inherent to the security and operations of blockchain design and will remain as such, but solutions like universal gas tokens can remove the most common friction of cross-chain transactions from users.
Users touch blockchains mostly through wallets, gas, and network choice. Following Particle’s definition of chain abstraction – a user experience exempt from the manual processes required to interact with multiple chains – unified, low barrier wallets and user-facing features are some of the most important elements of constructing a chain-abstracted future for blockchains.
Intents
Intents are exactly what they sound like – intentions. Intents are a service offered to users that helps them fulfill the onchain intentions most efficiently. Intents will soon be the foundation of chain-abstracted experiences; what began as solutions to fulfilling specific simple onchain user desires, such as swapping one asset for another without being exposed to bad MEV, intents have matured into massive coordination networks of sophisticated transaction routes that deliver desired outcomes to users without requiring them to jump through the typical hoops required to interact with however many blockchains are involved with their intentions.
With an expanding infinity of possible ways to execute a transaction, these infinite options weigh on users and are a high barrier to blockchain adoption because of the high variety of protocols and applications users should understand before they make transactions casually. Users shouldn’t have to weigh differences in protocol or app fees, nor should they need to understand how to navigate slippage and MEV exposure; they should be able to express a desired outcome and have more knowledgeable parties compete to deliver the most efficient and revenue-maximizing outcome possible.
Intents, in my view, are the most tangible and mature component in the chain abstraction stack. They remove the most friction from user experiences today and have high degrees of customizability and growth ahead of them, such as the evolution of consumer intents, solver auctions, and verifiable computation for intent network participants.
While intent networks still need to cover lots of ground to be maximally useful for any combination of users’ onchain desires, their foundational infrastructure is being well-executed by expert teams and researchers, such as Particle Network, Aori, Burnt, Agoric, NEAR, and Everclear. I recommend checking out these teams to understand their unique approaches to intent-based networks and how they solve specific problems in the intents stack.
Wrapping This Up
Hopefully I’ve done enough to convince you that chain abstraction is absolutely *not* bullshit, moreover, I hope you can now see that nearly *everyone* is building toward a chain-abstracted future. We’ve all forecasted how impossible it would be to show our grandparents how to use blockchains quickly – chain abstraction reignites my hope that using blockchains can be easily graspable in the least sophisticated use cases. Chain abstraction has been and will always be about meeting user needs and making blockchains as usable as they are useful.
I’ll pass the baton to Pedro for next week’s article - but in the meantime, thanks for tuning in! If you have thoughts or feedback, feel free to drop a comment below or tag me on twitter @maccanomics.
& a huge thank you to our two additional partners who helped us craft this series: Arcana Network, and Nuffle Labs.
 | A guest post by
|