With the maturity of the concept and technology of chain abstraction, this will drive the Crypto industry towards a more user-friendly, developer-friendly, and highly interoperable direction, giving rise to truly killer applications that ordinary people can use.

Written by: Yue Xiaoyu's Journey in Web3 Products

1. The definition of chain abstraction given by Particle Network is: a user experience that is free from interacting with multiple chains.

This definition is actually very concise and clear, directly clarifying the ultimate goal of chain abstraction.

When users are using blockchain applications, the three most painful problems they encounter are: different chains require different wallets, the Gas tokens on each chain are different, and how to transfer assets across chains.

Chain abstraction is about extracting the common and essential parts of different chains, allowing users to not need to understand the characteristics of the underlying different chains, or even perceive the existence of various chains, and only need to use the product to achieve their intentions.

2. Why has the narrative of chain abstraction suddenly attracted market attention at this stage?

The biggest reason is the explosion in the number of chains.

In the previous cycle, during the bull market of 2020-2021, several well-known public chains such as Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Solana, and Cardano had already existed and were relatively mature, with no new public chains emerging.

However, in this cycle, starting from 2023, the number of new chains has begun to surge. There are two main driving forces: one is that existing public chains are expanding through Layer 2, and the other is that leading applications are issuing application chains to gain autonomy and value narratives.

To solve Ethereum's performance issues, various Layer 2 networks have emerged in the Ethereum ecosystem, and in the future, there will also be Layer 3 networks. This is like building elevated bridges on the original main roads of a city, forming a three-dimensional network that greatly alleviates traffic pressure.

According to data collected by L2Beat, the number of Layer 2 solutions on Ethereum has reached 11, and with many more Layer 2 solutions yet to be launched, this number will only increase.

Another trend is that when an application develops to a certain scale, there is often a motivation to issue its own chain to seek more freedom and project narratives, known as application chains (dApp Chains), such as leading decentralized derivatives trading application dYdX, decentralized social platform Friend.Tech, and leading decentralized trading platform Uniswap.

3. What is the relationship between chain abstraction and modularization?

The market's previous focus was on modularization because the demand for issuing chains required corresponding solutions.

This is why, six months ago, the narrative of modularization became popular, leading to a series of leading projects such as the data availability layer Celestia, the settlement layer Dymension, and the Rollup as a Service (RaaS) chain issuance platform AltLayer.

The essence of modularization is division of labor and cooperation; a complete system can be broken down into interchangeable different modules, where different modules are independent, secure, and scalable, and can be combined to achieve the operation of the entire system.

Modularization significantly reduces the cost of building a chain, making it easy to assemble a new chain.

As the number of chains expands and explodes, people have found that there are simply too many chains and infrastructure projects, leading to a direct deterioration of user experience on the user side.

Therefore, the narrative of infrastructure layers is no longer appealing, and attention has shifted to the user experience at the application layer.

Thus, the industry's focus has transitioned from modularization to chain abstraction. This is actually a sign of market maturity and progress.

To summarize the relationship and differences between modularization and chain abstraction:

• Modularization promotes the maturity of the infrastructure layer, while chain abstraction drives the progress of the application layer.
• Modularization addresses the issue of issuing chains, while chain abstraction addresses the issue of using chains.

4. How did products on the market solve the multi-chain problem before the emergence of chain abstraction?

To address the multi-chain experience issue, before the emergence of chain abstraction, products at the application layer adopted solutions to aggregate multiple chains themselves, even trying to smooth out the differences between different chains in product design, or preventing users from perceiving the differences between chains, thereby enhancing the user experience.

The most typical product is the OKX Web3 Wallet, where users can manage their digital assets, directly exchange tokens, transfer across chains, trade NFTs, purchase financial products on different chains, and more.

However, the OKX wallet has a team of hundreds and is backed by the resources of the OKX exchange, which is why it can provide such a good user experience.

Most projects and products have a very urgent need for a more universal technology, middleware, or architecture that can directly erase the differences between different chains and help their products enhance user experience.

In other words, there needs to be an intermediate layer between the application layer and the blockchain layer. This layer abstracts many of the underlying blockchain characteristics and provides a universal service for more blockchain applications, which is chain abstraction.

Looking back at the OKX wallet's solution, the OKX wallet, as a multi-chain wallet, simply aggregates many chains and different cross-chain bridges, allowing users to conveniently use multiple chains.

But the chain abstraction solution directly addresses the fundamental issue that the OKX wallet did not achieve: allowing users to completely ignore the chains, without needing to switch chains, without needing Gas on different chains, and without needing to operate cross-chain.

5. Summary

When we understand the problems that chain abstraction aims to solve, the background of its emergence, and its comparison with other solutions, we can have a clearer understanding of chain abstraction itself.

At this point, returning to the definition of chain abstraction mentioned at the beginning of this article: a user experience that is free from interacting with multiple chains.

Now, we should be able to more clearly recognize the value and goals represented by this concept behind the definition.

With the maturity of the concept and technology of chain abstraction, this will drive the Crypto industry towards a more user-friendly, developer-friendly, and highly interoperable direction, giving rise to truly killer applications that ordinary people can use.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。