Original Title: "Why Chain Abstraction Is the Next Frontier for Web3"

Author: Illia Polosukhin

Translation: Luccy, BlockBeats

Editor's Note:

Chain abstraction has gradually become a hot topic in the development trend of Web3. Since its establishment in 2018, the NEAR ecosystem has been working towards the vision of chain abstraction.

In this article, Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR, explores the concept of chain abstraction and provides a detailed introduction to NEAR's technology stack, emphasizing the importance of chain abstraction for improving the usability, discoverability, and security of Web3. Illia Polosukhin points out that NEAR's technology stack has expanded to support comprehensive chain abstraction for cross-chain and various applications. BlockBeats has translated the original article as follows:

Most of today's dapps are not actually true distributed applications. If users need to leave the application before using it, it is actually just a front-end rather than a real application. If users need to manually join and manage multiple accounts, process multiple gas fees and bridges through a trading platform, then have you really built an application? I don't think so - this may explain why only a few million people in the world are using dapps.

Because we believe in a more open and decentralized internet that supports everyone's autonomy and is more beneficial to the world, if we want to see wider adoption of Web3, we need to take action.

The prevailing concept in today's Web3 is modularity, which separates different functional layers of the blockchain, such as settlement, data availability, and execution, in order to improve scalability. L2, optimistic and ZK rollup, data availability layer, sidechains, and state channels are all examples of modular solutions.

The emergence of a large number of blockchain and rollup technologies has led to a decline in user and developer experience. The existence of modularity and numerous chains has led to more dispersed liquidity, applications, and users, resulting in a complex situation that is difficult for ordinary users to adapt to. The same is true for developers, who feel compelled to focus on specific technology stacks, while also limiting the audience for their applications. Now, when building a dapp, by choosing a single chain, you are actually locking yourself into a niche market.

I want to propose a better vision for the entire Ethereum ecosystem and Web3: let's work together to drive mainstream adoption through chain abstraction. The idea is to abstract the blockchain away from users so that it does not hinder their entry or participation. NEAR has been focused on this vision since 2018 and has now become the network with the most users in Web3: with 12.4 million monthly active users and a total of 34 million users.

Here's how we integrate with Web3 and attract billions of users through dapps.

What does this look like for users?

Let's imagine what using a dapp should be like: easily trading between different networks, navigating between different experiences seamlessly, all done within a single interface. For example, Alice picks up her phone and opens KAIKAI from her lock screen. She orders a smoothie from a local vendor and discovers that her favorite clothing store, Maison, has a discount offer in the app, so she orders a pair of spring shoes. Alice realizes she has earned enough KAICHING rewards to get a badge at Maison, not knowing it's an NFT on Polygon, and redeems it in her account.

When she later browsed Maison on the KAIKAI app that day, she noticed that her new badge revealed a discount for tickets to an exclusive event held in the store, featuring a DJ she liked. She used KAICHING to purchase 2 tickets, still unaware that this was an NFT on Arbitrum. With an extra spot, Alice invited her friend Bob to join her and asked for his address.

Bob sent his NEAR address to Alice and opened his application to view the ticket. He sent some ETH to Alice as a thank you for the invitation and checked the different cryptocurrencies in his account. As he had some time on the subway, he decided to buy some BTC and borrow USDC so that he could mint a Fighting Dragon NFT on Magic Eden. His friend Charles texted him earlier saying he wanted to buy one too so they could battle each other's dragons in the new game "Year of the Dragon" on NEAR and fight for each other's coins.

All of these interactions and transactions can be conducted in a completely private manner within a single interface. There are no wallets, no switching networks, and no transaction fees to deal with; these are all embedded directly into the exchange or purchase and represented on behalf of the user. Alice doesn't need to worry about which network her tickets are on, and Bob can send her ticket payments in any cryptocurrency he chooses, and then easily purchase other cryptocurrencies the next second. All of this is done within a single application. This is the level of seamlessness that we as an ecosystem should strive for.

How do we achieve chain abstraction?

Everyone building applications in Web3 will benefit from access to such a wide potential user market as demonstrated in this example - anyone who uses the application. Today, developers choose a network based on access to liquidity or users on a specific rollup or chain, but in the abstracted future of chains, they can simply build using the best technology. Users will increase for the best experience.

Imagine if Gmail users couldn't send messages to Outlook addresses, it wouldn't make sense. The same goes for Web3 addresses. The core assumption of chain abstraction is that end users don't care about the underlying blockchain. They just want the application to work properly. In fact, the blockchain is just the infrastructure that provides value to Web3: asset security against seizure, economic opportunities, removal of intermediaries in transactions, global permissionless identity, data sources, entertainment experiences, and more.

The core goal of chain abstraction is to integrate the increasingly fragmented Web3 modular landscape. While this will be most noticeable at the user experience level, the integration of liquidity and accounts benefits from security innovations.

Zero Knowledge (ZK) introduces a fundamentally new method for ledger security. Prior to this, people needed to trust a decentralized set of validators, but now even a single computer can prove that rules have been followed with a simple proof. This means that previously, developers were either forced to build on a shared chain or spend significant resources launching a new chain, but now they only need to start one on their single server.

This new paradigm introduces the concept of cross-settlement: as more and more chains become fully provable (ZK provable), if certain proofs are published on other chains, then the chain cannot be revoked without the need to restore other chains. Through ZK proof, transactions from one chain can also be settled on multiple other chains. This provides mesh security, as all proofs are continuously aggregated, allowing assets to be moved securely between these chains.

In order to achieve unified security, two things are needed at the bottom of the stack: data availability, which provides a way for everyone to synchronize when the operator is offline, and a mechanism for providing decentralized sorting for applications without centralized operators.

The next layer is identity with unified security. Users can have one address across all possible chains and freely move assets between them. From the user's perspective, this should be a single account where they can interact with applications on different chains and assets can be automatically bridged or exchanged.

I call it "account aggregation". NEAR will release the next version of FastAuth in March 2024, which will have the ability to map NEAR addresses to EVM, Bitcoin, and other addresses. NEAR accounts can request signatures for transactions on another chain, allowing them to be directly built as multi-chain applications on NEAR as smart contracts.

The last layer is the unified experience layer, or the application layer (such as DapDap), which provides a way to interact with various applications on the chain without the need for users to switch or leave a single interface. The scattered front-end can provide easy-to-build components in a chain-abstract way. NEAR can achieve this through NearJS, combining data indexing and scattered front-end - V2 will also be launched in March 2024.

NEAR How to achieve chain abstraction?

The NEAR ecosystem has been working towards the vision of chain abstraction since its establishment in 2018, focusing on usability, a flexible account model, and a highly scalable blockchain to support mainstream applications with billions of users. Today, this technology stack has expanded to support cross-chain and comprehensive chain abstraction for various applications.

· An expandable comprehensive blockchain that can grow to support over 1 billion active accounts per day.

· Secure aggregation technology stack, including NEAR DA, zkWASM (in collaboration with Polygon Labs), and fast finality provided by EigenLayer.

· Aggregation of accounts above this level, allowing for trading on all chains using a single account.

· Support querying data from the data layer of a predictable protocol that spans across holistic, comprehensive, modular, private, and permissioned chains.

· Intent relay, this infrastructure can be used to execute complex intents between chains.

· Provide a decentralized front-end with multi-chain discovery and composability, creating a unified experience.

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