Although this may be an exaggeration, the speed of application innovation may not be as fast as the addition of public chains.

Especially recently, with the improvement of modular public chains and RaaS, the rapid development of "scene chains" has been promoted, such as DePIN, AI or financial applications need an independent Blockchain network, and many long financial or comprehensive institutions also need to issuance their own chains (HashKey Chain and Base).

In addition, the second layer of Bitcoin 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 parallelized virtual machines (and parallel EVMs), such as Monad, MegaETH, Artela, etc.

For the average user, managing assets and applications on longest chains has become increasingly painful, not to mention leaving some gas (transaction fees) on each chain in case of emergency.

These problems have been solved by the popularity of "cross-chain bridges" over the past few years, and some of the Liquidity problems are sometimes categorized under the topic of "interoperability". But in the end, how to bring this liquidity together, or how to tie it all together, is a milestone.

Hence the birth of this new concept and narrative "chain abstraction", which can also be seen as "interoperability 2.0" or the ultimate form of such products.

Three scenarios

Because of these experience issues, Blockchain interoperability is becoming increasingly important. However, the purpose of users is not to use "cross-chain bridges", 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 longing chain assets on their own. However, with the competition of such long chains in the future, as well as the decentralization of applications and Liquidity, it is completely unrealistic for users to manage these assets by themselves. It's not uncommon to hear feedback from the community, "I don't remember stake any assets on which chains and in which protocol."

Users don't want to know what a "chain" is, they just want to know what it can be used for. Therefore, the "demand" should be what the user needs to know, and hiding the "chain" under the demand is the cognition of a normal user.

It is precisely because the cross-chain bridges cannot solve the needs of users to 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 on the whole, each team has similar modules and architectures, but their respective focuses are also very different, and can be divided into at least these three most representative directions: signature networks, common account layers, and cross-chain bridge aggregation.

In fact, it is also easy to understand that for the chain abstraction scheme, users are usually required to have a unified account, this account and the associated account can submit transactions on longest on-chains, while solving problems such as gas payment and cross-chain information communication. In addition to the above-mentioned commonalities, these solutions focus on different individual modules due to their own characteristics.

NEAR focuses on building a Decentralization Network with MPC Nodes to achieve longer chain signatures, while Particle focuses more on the EVM ecosystem, first supporting the public chain ecology that is currently more widely based on the EVM technology stack, while other solutions like Polygon and Optimism focus more on unified cross-chain bridges, more focused on their own RaaS ecosystem, and only serve L2 with 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 addresses generated on the NEAR on-chain to become the user's main account, while accounts and transactions on other chains are signed through a Decentralization Longer Computation (MPC) network and submitted to the target on-chain.

In addition, NEAR has launched a module called Multichain Gas Relayer (long chain gas Relay). The main function of this module is to pay the gas fee of the transaction, which solves the problem that users need to hold the native tokens of each on-chain when conducting cross-chain transactions. Currently, this feature supports paying for gas using NEP-141 tokens on NEAR or NEAR, and does not yet support broader gas abstraction.

The fundamental reason for this design is that NEAR is not an EVM-compatible chain, but as we all know, the mainstream of the current market is still the EVM isomorphic chain, and the number is long long. Therefore, interoperability with the EVM isomorphic chain can only be achieved through the MPC network.

As a result, there are some experiential issues:

1. Migration cost is large: For users of the Ethereum ecosystem, it is not possible to migrate directly (such as using MetaMask) to the NEAR ecosystem, or need to create a new account through NEAR.
2. The confirmation transaction process is longer: Because the EVM multichain wallet created through NEAR is EOA (that is, a wallet generated by public and private keys), for these cross-chain processes that require longing transactions (including at least authorization + transactions) to queue and sign in parallel, users need to wait for the confirmation process for a long time. And because it is separated and longest, all the gas it consumes cannot be optimized.

From the perspective of Token Utility, NEAR's native Token will become the gas Token of the entire chain abstraction process, and users need to consume NEAR to pay all gas costs in the entire chain abstraction process.

Universal accounts: Particle Network

Particle Network's solution, on the other hand, focuses more on the accounts themselves, scheduling other on-chain states and assets through an independent blockchain network. To put it more bluntly, users only need to use the Address of Particle Network to access the assets and applications of all chains, and Particle calls this Address Universal Account.

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

So this is a big difference, unlike NEAR, the design of Particle Network is to put EVM in the highest priority, natively an EVM address, access to any chain and application of the EVM ecosystem, or wallet, etc., will be quite easy.

From a user's point of view, Particle Network's EVM-first solution allows users to easily migrate the accounts created in the EVM ecosystem before, that is, to add a network in MetaMask, which is as simple as the process of adding Optimism or Arbitrum networks at that time.

Take a scenario that heavy or Web 2.5 users will have a strong perception as an example: USDT is distributed on several on-chains, such as 100 USDT on chain A, 100 USDT on chain B, and 100 USDT on chain C, when users want to use these assets to buy assets on chain D, it will be very troublesome. Although these USDT belong entirely to users, the user experience is not convenient to implement, because these assets are play people for suckers. If all these USDT are transported to one on-chain, it is not only a matter of finding cross-chain bridges and waiting time, but also preparing gas for different chains. With the Universal Account provided by Particle L1, users can collect the purchasing power distributed on different on-chains, buy assets of any chain with one click, and can choose any token as Gas. The underlying operating mechanism can be referred to the following figure.

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 longest transactions together, which not only saves the number and time of user signatures, but also saves gas involved in complex transaction scenarios.

Particle has designed long consumption and usage scenarios for its Token $PARTI. As an ordinary user, the most direct thing is to use the gas Token as a Universal Account to complete any Blockchain transaction, and if there is no $PARTI, you can also choose other Token to pay on your behalf (but no matter what Token you use to pay for gas, it will consume $PARTI). For the entire ecosystem, Particle L1 has 5 Node roles (refer to the figure below), which can become a Node through stake $PARTI and participate in network Consensus and transactions to obtain more long rewards. In addition, $PARTI Token can also act as LP Token within the Particle Network, participate in cross-chain atomic swap and earn transaction income.

Cross-chain bridges aggregation: Polygon AggLayer

Two typical schemes for cross-chain bridge aggregation are Polygon AggLayer and Optimism's Superchain. They are also all architectures designed with the Ethereum ecosystem first.

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 scheme, the Ethereum Mainnet is the center of everything, and then the cross-chain information of all chains is aggregated through a single zk-SNARKs.

But the problem is that other chains will not necessarily accept this unified liquidity cross-chain bridge contract, which will bring some resistance to access the new public chain, unless this solution can be accepted by all other public links, or become a broad industry standard. If you look at it from another angle, AggLayer is actually an extra feature for teams that have adopted the Polygon CDK development chain, so those who don't use the CDK won't come with this feature.

Optimism's Superchain is similar, they will focus on the interoperability between Ethereum Layer 2 first, after all, there are already some teams using the OP Stack to develop more long layer 2 networks, and they can achieve interoperability in this way, but more importantly, how to expand to a wider range of other public chain networks.

Therefore, in terms of user experience, AggLayer and Superchain can also be easily migrated from MetaMask because they are bound to the EVM ecosystem, but they cannot be connected to the ecosystem outside the EVM.

Summary

Although these schemes differ in focus, they share the same goal: to provide users with a simple and intuitive way to manage longest chain assets and applications in a rapidly expanding world of Blockchain networks. Each team is grappling with how to keep operations simple and clear for users in a longest chain environment.

From the perspective of the three schemes, NEAR's signature network takes the NEAR network as the core, and designs a decentralization MPC network to implement cross-chain signatures. Particle Network's universal accounts focus on enhancing interoperability through the powerful ecosystem of EVM, while accessing longest other public chain ecosystems. Polygon AggLayer, on the other hand, 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 drop complexity of user cross-chain operation.

But I think in the end, these technology choices will end up in the same way. Because they all work towards the same end goal – to improve the user-friendliness and interoperability of the Blockchain ecosystem. As technology evolves and the industry becomes more integrated, we may see more long collaboration and convergence, and the lines between approaches may blur. Therefore, it is more important not only to choose the technology and narrative, but also to land as soon as possible and let users perceive this new experience of full-chain aggregation.

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