The 2.0 Moment of Blockchain Interoperability: Chain Explosion and Chain Abstraction

Author: ZHIXIONG PAN Source: chainfeeds

Although it may be a bit exaggerated to say so, the speed of application innovation may not be as fast as the speed of new additions to the public chain.

Especially recently, with the improvement of modular public chains and RaaS, the rapid development of "scenario chains" has been promoted. For example, DePIN, AI or financial applications all require an independent blockchain network, and many financial or comprehensive institutions also need to issue their own chains (HashKey Chain and Base).

In addition, Bitcoin's second layer has also been intensively launched in the past two months, such as Citrea, BOB, Bitlayer, Merlin Chain, etc. Finally, there is the eternal topic of "performance", which is also driven by parallel virtual machines (and Parallel EVM), such as Monad, MegaETH, Artela, etc.

For ordinary users, managing assets and applications on multiple chains has become increasingly painful, not to mention that some Gas (transaction fees) must be reserved on each chain for emergency use.

These problems have been solved in the past few years with the popularization of "cross-chain bridges", which have partially solved the liquidity problem, and are sometimes classified under the topic of "interoperability". But how to bring these liquidity together, or connect all these experiences in series, is a milestone.

So this new concept and narrative "chain abstraction" was born, which can also be regarded as "interoperability 2.0" or the ultimate form of such products.

Three solutions

It is precisely because of these experience problems that the interoperability of blockchains has become increasingly important. However, the purpose of users is not to use the "cross-chain bridge", but to achieve more specific needs, such as trading specific assets or using certain applications.

In scenarios with only a few chains, users can barely manage cross-chain bridges and multi-chain assets by themselves. However, with the competition of so many chains in the future, as well as the dispersion of applications and liquidity, it is completely unrealistic for users to safely manage these assets by themselves. Such feedback can often be heard in the community: "I have completely forgotten what assets I have pledged in which chains and which protocols."

Users do not want to know what "chain" is, they just want to know what it can be used for. Therefore, "demand" should be what users need to understand, and hiding "chain" under demand is a normal user's cognition.

It is precisely because the cross-chain bridge cannot solve the user's needs to uniformly manage assets and directly use applications that the concept of chain abstraction is proposed as another important node under the topic of "interoperability".

There are already many teams focusing on "chain abstraction" and providing solutions, but overall, each team has similar modules and architectures, but their respective focuses are also very different. At least they can be divided into these three most representative directions: signature network, general account layer and cross-chain bridge aggregation.

In fact, it is also easy to understand. For chain abstraction solutions, users are usually required to have a unified account. This account and associated accounts can submit transactions on multiple chains, while solving problems such as gas payment and cross-chain information communication. In addition to the above common parts, these solutions focus on different independent modules due to their own characteristics.

NEAR focuses on building a decentralized network with MPC nodes to achieve multi-chain signatures, while Particle focuses more on the EVM ecosystem, first supporting the public chain ecosystem that is currently more widely built based on the EVM technology stack, while other solutions like Polygon and Optimism focus more on a unified cross-chain bridge and focus more on their own RaaS ecosystem, only serving L2 using CDK or OP Stack.

Signature Network: NEAR

The signature network solution was proposed by NEAR and is called "Chain Signatures". The core of this technology is to allow the address generated on the NEAR chain to become the user's primary account, while the accounts and transactions of other chains are signed through a decentralized multi-party computing (MPC) network and submitted to the target chain.

In addition, NEAR has also launched a module called Multichain Gas Relayer. The main function of this module is to pay the gas fees of transactions on behalf of others, solving the problem that users need to hold native tokens on each chain when conducting cross-chain transactions. Currently, this function supports the use of NEAR or NEP-141 tokens on NEAR to pay gas fees, and cannot support a wider range of gas abstractions.

The fundamental reason for this design is that NEAR is not an EVM-compatible chain, but as we all know, the mainstream of the market is still EVM isomorphic chains, which are much more numerous. Therefore, interoperability with EVM isomorphic chains can only be achieved through the MPC network.

Therefore, there will be some problems at the user experience level:

1. The migration cost is high: For users of the Ethereum ecosystem, it is impossible to migrate directly (such as using MetaMask) to the NEAR ecosystem, and a new account must be created through NEAR.

2. The transaction confirmation process is long: Because the EVM multi-chain wallet created through NEAR is EOA (that is, a wallet generated by public and private keys), for cross-chain processes that require multiple transactions (at least authorization + transactions) to be queued and signed in parallel, the user may need to wait for a long time for confirmation. And because it is separated into multiple transactions, all the gas consumed cannot be optimized.

From the perspective of token utility, NEAR's native token will become the gas token for the entire chain abstraction process. Users need to consume NEAR to pay for all gas costs in the entire chain abstraction process.

Universal Account: Particle Network

The Particle Network solution focuses more on the account itself, scheduling the status and assets on other chains through an independent blockchain network. To put it more bluntly, users only need to use the Particle Network address to access the assets and applications of all chains. Particle calls this address the Universal Account.

As for the relay of information, that is, the transmission of messages across different chains, Particle's L1 monitors the execution of UserOps of external chains through the Relayer Node on its own chain, but because the underlying layer is still based on EVM, if you want to support the addresses of non-EVM isomorphic chains, you may need other modules to support it, such as the MPC network similar to NEAR.

So this is a big difference. Unlike NEAR, Particle Network is designed with EVM as the top priority. It is natively an EVM address, and it is quite easy to access any chain, application, or wallet in the EVM ecosystem.

From a user's perspective, Particle Network's EVM-first solution allows users to easily migrate accounts previously created in the EVM ecosystem, which is just adding a network in MetaMask, just as simple as adding the Optimism or Arbitrum network at the time.

Take a scenario that heavy or Web 2.5 users will have a strong perception of as an example: USDT is distributed on several chains, for example, 100 USDT on chain A, 100 USDT on chain B, and 100 USDT on chain C. When users want to use these assets to purchase assets on chain D, it will be very troublesome. Although all these USDTs belong to the users, the user experience is not convenient because these assets are separated. If all these USDTs are moved to one chain, it is not only a matter of finding a cross-chain bridge and waiting time, but also possible to prepare the Gas of different chains. The Universal Account provided by Particle L1 allows users to aggregate the purchasing power distributed on different chains, purchase assets of any chain with one click, and can choose any Token as Gas. The underlying operating mechanism can be referred to in the figure below.

In addition, the biggest difference between the Particle solution and NEAR is that the granularity of transactions is different, and batch signatures and transactions can also be achieved through aggregation. That is, users can bundle multiple transactions together, which not only saves the number and time of user signatures, but also saves the Gas involved in complex transaction scenarios.

Particle has designed a variety of consumption and usage scenarios for its token $PARTI. As an ordinary user, the most direct way is to use it as a Gas token for Universal Account to complete transactions on any blockchain. If you don’t have $PARTI, you can also choose other tokens to pay for it (but no matter which token is used to pay for Gas, $PARTI will be consumed). For the entire ecosystem, Particle L1 has 5 node roles (see the figure below). You can become a node by staking $PARTI and participate in network consensus and transactions to get more rewards. In addition, $PARTI tokens can also act as LP tokens in Particle Network, participate in cross-chain atomic exchanges and earn transaction income.

Cross-chain bridge aggregation: Polygon AggLayer

Two typical cross-chain bridge aggregation solutions are Polygon AggLayer and Optimism's Superchain. They are also a whole set of architectures designed with Ethereum ecology as the priority.

Compared with traditional cross-chain bridges, AggLayer hopes to unify the standards of cross-chain bridge contracts, so that there is no need for independent smart contracts between each chain and Ethereum. So in this solution, the Ethereum mainnet is the center of everything, and then a zero-knowledge proof is used to aggregate the cross-chain information of all chains.

But the problem here is that other chains may not accept this unified liquidity cross-chain bridge contract, which will bring some resistance to accessing new public chains, unless this solution can be accepted by all other public chains or become a broad industry standard. If you understand it from another perspective, AggLayer is actually an additional function for teams that use Polygon CDK to develop chains, so those who don’t use CDK will not have this function.

Optimism’s Superchain is somewhat similar. They will first focus on the interoperability between Ethereum Layer2. After all, some teams have used OP Stack to develop more second-layer networks. They can use this method to achieve interoperability, but the more important thing is how to expand to a wider range of other public chain networks.

So from the user experience point of view, AggLayer and Superchain can be easily migrated from MetaMask because they are bound to the EVM ecosystem, but they cannot be accessed from the ecosystem outside of EVM.

Summary

Although these solutions differ in focus, their common goal is the same: to provide users with a simple and intuitive way to manage multi-chain assets and applications in a world where blockchain networks are rapidly expanding. Each team is working hard to solve how to keep operations simple and clear for users in a multi-chain environment.

From the three solutions, NEAR's signature network is centered on the NEAR network and is designed to implement cross-chain signatures in a decentralized MPC network. Particle Network's universal account focuses on enhancing interoperability through the powerful ecosystem of EVM, while being able to access more other public chain ecosystems. Polygon AggLayer focuses on optimizing interoperability within the Ethereum ecosystem by aggregating cross-chain bridges. Although these solutions have different technical implementations and application focuses, they all aim to improve the convenience and reduce the complexity of users' cross-chain operations.

But I think that in the end, these technology selections will end up in the same place. Because they all face the same ultimate goal - to improve the user-friendliness and interoperability of the blockchain ecosystem. With the development of technology and further integration of the industry, we may see more cooperation and integration, and the boundaries between the various solutions may become blurred. So now it is more important not only to choose technology and narrative, but to land it as soon as possible and let users perceive this new experience of full-chain aggregation.