WHY

Imagine that you are a newcomer to blockchain, and you want to manage and allocate your assets on the chain reasonably, but you find that there are a lot of commonly used public chains. You have to deal with different public chains for various ways of using funds. You must understand the basic knowledge of these public chains, which greatly increases the complexity you face;

Imagine that you are a developer in the blockchain industry, and you may want to develop a multi-chain application. To do this, you need to clearly know the development knowledge of each chain, which greatly increases your mental burden;

For this reason, we need a technology that can make the end user not have to face the complexity of multi-chain, make the operation more convenient (improve ux), and reduce the difficulty for developers to develop multi-chain applications (improve devx);

And this is exactly what Chain Abstraction can bring to us.

WHAT

In fact, just from the literal meaning, we can know that chain abstraction is the abstraction layer of blockchain; in computer science, whenever people encounter problems caused by complexity, they often add an abstraction layer to the entire system. The upper layer faces a simple interface after abstraction, and the complex implementation is the responsibility of the bottom layer; and chain abstraction is in a sense the abstraction layer of web3: in order to hide the complexity, a unified interface of the chain is provided, and users only need to deal with this interface to complete various operations without having to understand the knowledge of various public chains.

HOW

Going further, the technology stack of chain abstraction generally includes the following parts: intent framework, interoperability, and wallet abstraction;

Intent framework is a mechanism that allows users to define the results they want to achieve (such as transactions) without specifying a specific execution path; it can find the best path for users to achieve their goals, and projects such as dappos are solving this problem;

Interoperability is responsible for cross-chain communication, and more representative projects include layerzero and wormhole;

Wallet abstraction is to chain abstraction what wallet is to blockchain, and it plays the role of a portal;

There are also many excellent projects that combine these different but critical technologies to make quite good products, such as universalX created by particle network;

SUMMARY

The biggest role of chain abstraction is to improve the experience of crypto players, so that players do not have to be restricted by the complexity of various public chains.