Highlights
- Chain Abstraction, as an upgrade of Account Abstraction, has the core concept of abstracting the underlying technology of blockchain from the user experience, thereby lowering the web3 application threshold and optimizing the user experience. Typical projects at present include the blockchain represented by Near, and the functional service provider represented by Particle Network.
- Near aims to ensure the security of high-value assets such as money and identities within the ecosystem while making its chain with sufficient capability and accessibility. To achieve this, NEAR offers a suite of services that can abstract the blockchain away from the user experience, meaning that users can use dApps without needing to understand the technical details involved.
- Particle Network is a modular Layer1 with core functionality that includes Universal Accounts, Universal Liquidity, and Universal Gas Tokens. Particle Network also implements dual staking to bootstrap crypto-economic security and aggregated data availability to eliminate single points of failure in network data availability.
1. Overview of Chain Abstraction
Web3's user experience has always been a shortcoming, with fragmented underlying public chains, cumbersome and redundant L2 and modular blockchains inevitably sacrificing user and developer experience. The idea behind Chain Abstraction is that blockchain technology should be abstracted from the user experience. In other words, people using a dApp should not be aware of when they are using a blockchain or which blockchain they are using. The core assumption of chain abstraction is that end-users don't care about the underlying blockchain; they just want the app to work, and that the blockchain is just the infrastructure for extracting value from the Web3: asset security from seizure, economic opportunity, elimination of transaction intermediaries, global permissionless identities, data sourcing, entertainment experience, and more.
The examples NEAR gives are very specific and vivid:
Alice picks up her phone and opens KAIKAI from the lock screen. She orders a smoothie from a local store and sees in the app that her favorite clothing store, Maison, has a sale going on, so she orders a pair of spring shoes. Alice realizes that she's earned enough KAICHING rewards to redeem the badge at Maison, but she doesn't know that's the NFT on Polygon and redeemed it in her account.
As she is browsing Maison in the KAIKAI app later that day, she notices that the new badge shows an offer for tickets to an exclusive event in their store with her favorite DJ. She purchases the tickets using KAICHING and receives two tickets, while she is still unaware that the NFT is on Arbitrum. Since she has an extra spot, Alice invites her friend Bob to come with her and asks for his address.
Bob sends Alice his NEAR address and opens his app to view the tickets. He sends Alice some ETH to show his appreciation for the invitation and looks at the different cryptocurrencies in his account. Since he is on the subway and had some time on his hands, he decides to buy some BTC and pledge it with USDC so he can cast a Fighting Dragon NFT on Magic Eden. His friend Charles has previously messaged him about a new game they could play on NEAR where their dragons can fight each other to gain tokens they could pledge.
All of these interactions and transactions can take place in a single interface and are completely private. There are no wallets, no switching networks, and no transaction fees to deal with; these are embedded directly in the exchange or purchase and handled by the user's representative. Alice doesn't need to worry about which network the ticket is on; Bob can send her the payment funds for the ticket in whatever cryptocurrency he wants, and the next moment he can easily buy another cryptocurrency. It all happens in one app, and that's the level of seamlessness we should be aiming for as an ecosystem.
In terms of specific implementations, the projects differ in their thinking, but the development of ZK (Zero Knowledge) deserves a lot of credit. ZK introduces a completely new ledger security approach. Whereas previously one needed to trust a decentralized collection of verifiers, it is now possible to prove with a simple proof that the rules were followed, even if there is only a single computer. This new paradigm introduces the concept of cross-settlement: as more and more chains become fully provable ZKs, there is no way to revoke a chain without revoking other chains if certain proofs are posted on them. Transactions from one chain can also be settled on multiple other chains via ZK proofs, which successfully provides mesh security as all proofs are constantly being aggregated, allowing assets to be moved securely between these chains.
2. Case Study
2. 1 NEAR
Arguably the originator of the chain abstraction venue, NEAR's aim has always been to make its chain sufficiently performant and accessible while ensuring the security of high-value assets such as funds and identities within the ecosystem. To this end, NEAR builds from the ground up to provide an intuitive experience for end users. Its proposed super wallet, BOS operator side, etc. are entirely Web2 design ideas, but such system magic does help lower the threshold for users in the Web3 space.
2. 1. 1 Project Overview
When we work with traditional Web2 programs, we don't need to know how the applications are built and which database they use, we choose applications based on their functionality rather than the underlying technology. Near believes that the same should be true for blockchain applications, users should be able to enjoy the application independently of the underlying technology, and the user experience should be so good that the user doesn't realize that he or she is using blockchain. that users don't realize they are using blockchain. To help achieve this, NEAR offers a suite of services that abstract the blockchain from the user experience, meaning that users can use blockchain-based applications (both NEAR and other chains) without having to understand the technical details.
When opening the Near website, users can create a Near account by email to log in to its BOS operating system. The interface is very similar to traditional Web2 social media sites such as Facebook, and currently includes Featured Components, Posts, News and other sections, which is in line with the positioning of its OS-like operating system. In its Featured Component section, users can click the open button to go directly to the liquidity staking page or NFT interface of the corresponding protocol, which is very close to the experience of using Web2 products.
2. 1.2 How does Near implement chain abstraction?
Since its launch in 2018, the Near ecosystem has been working to realize the chain abstraction vision, focusing on usability, a flexible account model and a highly scalable blockchain to support mainstream applications with billions of users. Today, the stack has been extended to support full chain abstraction across chains and types of applications that can reach more than 1 billion daily active accounts. Its key services include the following:
Relayers
Before understanding the Relayers, here is some explanation of meta transaction. The Meta transaction feature allows users to execute transactions on Near without having to own any tokens. In order to do this, the user needs to construct and sign the transaction off-chain, and a third party (the relayer) is responsible for paying the fees for submitting and executing the transaction. For example, Alice owns a certain number of tokens $FT and she wants to transfer some of them to John. To do so, she needs to call ft_transfer("john", 10) on an account named FT. The problem, however, is that Alice does not have NEAR tokens; she only has a NEAR account that someone else has funded for her, and she has the private key. Alice can create a signed transaction that makes the ft_transfer("john", 10) call, but the validator node won't accept it because she doesn't have the balance of Near tokens needed to purchase the gas fee.
With a meta transaction, Alice can create a DelegateAction, which is very similar to a transaction and contains a list of actions to be performed and a single receiver (receiver). She signs the DelegateAction and forwards it (off-chain) to a relayer. The repeater encapsulates it in a transaction for which the relayer is a signer and therefore pays a gas fee. If there is a token balance attached to the internal action, it is also paid by the relayer.
On the chain, the SignedDelegateAction within the transaction is converted into a receipt for the action with the same SignedDelegateAction on the relayer chunk. The receipt is forwarded by Alice to the account, which will decompress the SignedDelegateAction and verify that it is signed by Alice with a valid Nonce, etc. If all checks are successful, a new action receipt with the internal action as the subject is sent to the FT. Finally, the ft_transfer call is executed.
A Meta transaction can only work with a relayer, which is an application-layer concept implemented off-chain and can be thought of as a server that receives the SignedDelegateAction, which does some checking of the SignedDelegateAction and ultimately forwards it to the blockchain network in a transaction.
A relayer is a simple network service that receives transactions from NEAR users and forwards them to the network while attaching tokens to cover GAS fees. A relayer is a natural consequence of a meta transaction (NEP-366), where a user expresses "I want to perform a specific operation on the chain" and signs this intent off-chain, but does not send it to the network. Instead, they send that intent to a relayer, which encapsulates the information into an actual transaction, attaches the necessary funds, and sends it to the network.
Multiple application scenarios where relayers are applicable include but are not limited to:
- User is new to NEAR and does not have any funds to trade;
- Users have accounts on NEAR but only have tokens, which they can now use to pay gas fees;
- Enterprises or large startups want to seamlessly connect existing users to NEAR without them having to worry about gas fees;
- Enterprises or large startups may have a high volume of user activity that causes network congestion, at which point non-urgent transactions can be queued in a relayer;
- In exchange for paying the gas fee, the relayer operator can restrict where a subscriber can use its assets while allowing the subscriber to have custody and possession of its assets;
- To Improve capital efficiency. In the absence of relayers, if an enterprise has 1 million subscribers, it would have to allocate 0.25 NEAR to each of them in order to pay for a total of 250k NEAR of gas. However, only about 10% of the users would actually use this subsidy, and most of that 250k NEAR sits idle. By using a relayer, companies can allocate 50k NEAR to users as a global pool of funds, to be subsequently replenished as needed.
Chain Signatures
Near has constructed an MPC Nodes chain-wide Common Verification Signature system, where chain signatures enable NEAR accounts to sign and execute transactions across multiple blockchain protocols. By giving ownership of various assets, cross-chain accounts, and data to a single NEAR account to enhance blockchain interoperability, it essentially aligns with the underlying logic of interoperable interoperability for other relay chain types. Controlling accounts and their assets on other blockchain platforms relies on the interplay between three elements:
Derivation Paths: a deterministic method of deriving multiple addresses from a single NEAR account;
Multi-chain Smart Contract: Receive requests to sign other blockchain transactions;
Multiparty Computation Service (MPC Service): A third party service that provides signatures for contracts. With the MPC service, users can ensure that no one but themselves can request signatures for these accounts.
Examples of use cases for multichain signatures are given below.
Trading assets across different blockchains usually requires the use of cross-chain bridges that support them, which takes a long time to settle because the transactions are not atomic and need to be confirmed on both blockchains. By using multi-chain signatures, on the other hand, users can change the ownership of different blockchain accounts (e.g., Bitcoin and Ether) to trade assets across chains without making on-chain transactions. This allows users to keep native tokens on their native blockchain (e.g., BTC on Bitcoin, ETH on Ether, ARB on Arbitrum) and trade without cross-chain bridges, with settlement taking as little as 2 seconds and supporting any token on any chain.
For example, a basic transaction flow is as follows:
1) a user creates an account controlled by the NEAR chain signature; 2) the user funds (deposits) these accounts on the native blockchain; 3) the new account is funded with the total amount of the order, thus placing the order; 4) another user accepts the order; and 5) the user exchanges control of the key to fulfill the order.
Super Wallet
Previously, users could sign transactions at MetaMask and connect to NEAR, but according to NEAR's chain abstraction strategy, a super wallet should be able to traverse all Web3 applications, while hiding all the functions of Gas consumption, asset bridging, switching networks, and so on. In other words, NEAR tries to make an abstraction of the wallet paradigm as well.
Under normal circumstances, in order for wallets to be smooth and smooth, and to reduce the "out-migration rate" of users, they usually have to strengthen their development and adapt to various heterogeneous chains and diversified assets. However, in the abstract background of NEAR chain, the wallet only needs to be smoothly adapted to NEAR chain. The compatibility of other chains, cross-chain interoperability of assets, and autonomous network switching can be hidden. For example, if a user browses an application in the wallet Discover, the wallet will automatically configure the network and handle the switching of asset status when he clicks the button to interact with it, so that the user will feel the same as browsing an e-commerce site for shopping without having to care about the whole back-end interaction logic. SenderLabs wallet on the NEAR chain seems to be working hard in this direction.
2.2 Particle Network
Particle Network is a modular Layer1 network based on the Cosmos SDK. By integrating the IBC protocol, Particle Network enables easy and efficient cross-blockchain transactions with other IBC-enabled blockchain networks, thus enhancing interoperability and a seamless user experience. In addition, Particle Network integrates Rollkit, which is specifically designed for creating and deploying Rollups, thus saving development costs.Particle Network's core products include the following.
Universal Account
The Particle Network Universal Account provides a unified address, balance, and interaction point for each user, without the user having to consider which chain the dApp or funds used are on. In addition, the Universal Account is compatible with EVM and non-EVM networks via ERC-4337, providing greater flexibility, programmability and security.
Particle Network has also developed WaaS. WaaS (Wallet-as-a-Service) enables developers to embed their products directly into their platforms, lowering the barrier to web3 usage, for users to log in directly socially or by connecting to traditional web3 wallets (e.g., Metamask) and more.
Unified Gas Token
While traditional multi-chain ecosystems require the use of the respective chain's token (e.g., SOL, ETH, etc.), Particle Network allows users to use the Particle token on each chain or any chain token involved in the user's operation to pay for the gas fees on different chains, greatly enhancing the convenience of the user experience. In addition, Particle employs a dual collateralization mechanism, using a unified gas token with rehypothecated Ethereum as collateral. The introduction of ETH as a staking asset can bring low volatility and high liquidity, stabilizing the economic foundation of the network and effectively preventing the risk of death spiral due to too much volatility of the native token.
Full chain of Custody Account Abstraction
Particle Network's design of a chain-wide account abstraction solution significantly optimizes the convenience and security of users' cross-chain operations through the introduction of chain-wide storage, unified smart contract accounts, separation of transaction execution and gas fee payment, and efficient cross-chain messaging mechanisms.
3. Closing Thoughts
In today's crypto market, there are thousands of Layer1 and Layer2, and the user experience is highly fragmented. Cross-chaining has always been a problem that developers are committed to solving, and the demand for cross-chain abstraction is increasing day by day. Chain abstraction optimizes the user experience by abstracting the complex operations of the blockchain, and also reflects the blockchain industry's gradual shift from the pursuit of high performance to the gradual emphasis on quality experience. The current chain abstraction track is still at an early stage, and participants represented by Near and Particle Network have initially formed a framework for chain abstraction. In the foreseeable future, there will be more and more applications dedicated to solving the complex intentions of users, and we look forward to the prosperous development of chain abstraction narratives.
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