Why WEB3 Needs Chain Abstraction - Illia Polosukhin

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   hello hello thank you that's a interesting addition to the to my introduction uh hopefully it doesn't STi for too long so uh really great to be here thank you everyone for coming uh and I'm kind of grateful opening this day up with uh what is chain abstraction and why do we need it so hopefully uh you enjoy it and uh enjoy the whole day so I'll start with a controversial statement the current applications that

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   we have in web 3 are not real applications they're front ends for smart contracts but as a kind of the experience itself it's a combination of the wallet the bridge The blockchain Exchange and I think one of the like interesting controversial statements right now that the state of the multi-chain experience in web 3 in general is binance and coinbase that's really like what people are actually using as an application for blockchain

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   because that's where you can go and actually has access have access to all of the different um you know crypto currencies and various other applications and uh use cases like lending uh all in one place and you don't need to like figure out how to deal with you know chains gas fees recovery methods you know secure account that's a very kind of you know sad state in a way because you know we started this decentralized um kind of non-custodial

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   user owned uh movement but we ended up with centralized applications because they need to deliver the experience to the user and so the current state is highly fragmented right we have like if you're launching on a single chain you automatically limiting your target market right you however that chain like whichever the chain is like by definition it only has a Sub sub kind of section of users and even again

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   most users are not even on chain at all we have highly fragmented everything from user experience you know like uh with lots of wallets chain kind of change to select in wallet addresses developer experience with different kind of environments which you need to build for and kind of extremely hard to find applications right um like which ones are real which ones to use which chain they're on which gas tokens to use there I don't know about you but I have I

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   think like a dozen wallets many of these wallets have you know like lots and lots of accounts each account like has something on different chains like sometimes I just sit in metamask and like switch networks to find where it is like where do I actually have have the tokens and at the end kind of the end users are just one the you know the opportunity that we're creating with this applications right they want an experience they want you know beat at entertainment or uh kind of you know potential to earn money it's not for

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   them about you know choosing a chain and figuring out what is a long-term you know security uh implications of a layer two however we think you know uh talking about it on Twitter is that and so how do how about we instead of you know continue defragmenting the space which uh we've been very effective at uh for past few years how about we start putting it all together and really bring people together instead of kind of you know some with a bunch of beefs uh

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   on crypto you know or uh each each kind of community trying to uh show off that they're better than the other and so that's really what we're trying to do here we're trying to create a new movement a chain abstraction movement that is about bringing people together people from different ecosystems people from different uh kind of chains from different environments but also people

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   that are not into blockchains to have the experience that they can and uh really provide at the end this kind of uniform web three experience that we believe is better than and a centralized environment so really grateful for all the folks who are here from Cosmos the CDM ecosystems and Salon ecosystems and I hope we can continue bringing more folks together across the events around

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    the globe and as well more and more people are starting to build kind of with that mindset in mind uh which I'm really excited about and so a lot of the technologies that been built right now right be that you know ug layer by polygon intent by intense by anoma uh we have orchestration by agoric we have you know modularity by celestian other uh folks like all of them are really a

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    method they're you know a tool but at the end what they're trying to solve is the same problems like how do we deliver this chain abstract experience and I think that's really important you know there's a what we're trying to achieve and how we're doing it right and we in cryp are very good at conflating these two things and like talking about what we're doing as the main thing but at the

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    end we should be kind of really focused on how we like want to change the experience and how we are uh delivering this to the end user so for us kind of this journey started a long time ago when we started near I mean kind of our experience started with trying to build something on blockchain ourselves and we were trying to build a data crowdsourcing for what we're working on AI at the time and we found out that we were building something that was giving work to people

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    around the globe and in crypto the first thing you needed to do as a new user was to buy some crypto to be able to use a crypto application which is extremely strange proposition where you say hey here's a job but you need to actually pay first and so that's why kind of when we started near our Focus has been how do we kind of remove a lot of the what is normal in blockchain what was normal and kind of still normal in blockchain from the user and abstruct the blockchain away while delivering on you

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    know Global Payments Global availability and censorship ability to actually access Global Market for anyone independently where you are in the world so for us kind of we've always been on this journey we mostly focused on kind of can we make near to not be in front of the user and make it really easy to use right everything from a kind obstruction n natively built to allow you know easy on boarding uh we have you know obviously scalability to allow kind of

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    consistently low fees and uh kind of developer tooling that allows to build experiences that on board you know millions of people without them knowing they're using crypto and somewhere kind of end of 22 beginning of 23 we realized that Beyond this like you know we are living in multi-chain world and more and more chains are kind of popping up the you know ZK is maturing to a level where you can run you know alternative kind of a layer two approach with zero knowledge

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    proof achieving very similar security guarantees that if you ran on layer one and from that perspective how do we deliver kind of this experience across the board so that's what we're doing now we kind of want to expand this idea uh that near been working on on and bring it to all chains so we started with obviously a layer one that's scalable that kind of removes the need for people to think about blockchain as much as possible um

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    we have then uh kind of broad data availability so that you can unify security for uh for layer Twos for rollups while bringing the price dramatically down right we partnered with z to bring fast finality to be able to take layer twos or other chains and finalize them and have a quick uh cross chain messaging uh embedded into this and finally we're working with polygon on ZK vasm which will allow to also prove the near

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    blockchain itself and aggregate it aggregate security with other chains kind of all of the pieces together in a way unify security make it uh easy for users to not need to think think about specific implementations of individual chain individual rollup but actually being able to use all of them uh kind of and have the same guarantees around security now it's cool to have security it's really important this is what the

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    space is built on but the big part is the user experience and so the main thing we've been working on has been how do we allow a individual user to be able to interact with all of those chains without needing to think about the kind of where that blockchain is and how exactly uh to move assets to it which gas token is used and similarly not just for users how do we do this for developers who want to build contracts

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    which live across blockchains and so we introducing chain signatures which is a approach with a near multiparty computation nodes going to be maintaining um shared private key where not no single node uh or even you know a group of them can uh pretty much do anything unless you have two-thirds of them agreeing to be able to sign transactions and have uh kind of linked addresses on other chains this allows to have a very unique

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    experience where you can kind of initiate your transaction on near but it will be relayed on ethereum or Bitcoin you'll have a remote addresses and the way to think about it is is when you go to binance or coinbase you sign up with your coinbase account but you get a lot of addresses on other chains which you can deposit funds to and use them within your coinbase account now imagine that but non-custodial and you can actually

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    go and use that directly in other applications across web 3 that's what we're doing there's a lot of Technology going into it uh and um folks will be expanding more on that uh kind of one of the big Parts is um pretty much using uh key res sharing mechanism that allows to have uh validators who maintaining kind of a cosigning of the signatures to join and leave uh while maintaining the

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    same key and so like we build on top of this uh the idea of chain signatures allowing to now sign this and have all of the access controls of near account kind of all account struction there now the other important piece on top of kind of this account level uh abstraction aggregation is the front ends because I mentioned right now you know you go in like Google an app you're probably going to click on something that's trying to fish and trying to steal all your money and if you think of

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    it you know as new uh layer to launching there's applications there how do you find them how do you make sure they're indeed you know verified correct at the same time even when you have application right you know curve front end was hacked a bunch of front end were hacked how do we ensure that we have security and consistency of smart contracts and the front ends you're accessing and so kind of one of

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    the Frameworks we built called decentralized front ends is allowing to have linkage between the front end itself and the smart contract because the front end is deployed on chain so the source code of the front end itself is on chain and it can be managed in exactly the same way as your smart cont contract it can be a multi upgrade a dow upgrade or whatever uh you have now all

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    of this can be then aggregated into a single kind of super app a platform and so an example of this is dabdab dabdab is a uh a single application that has 14 layer twos 150 different smart contract kind of accessible through it you can find what does the new airdrops are find new quests and be able to interact with all of this without leaving one single app and kind of that's idea how in the future we think all of this will start

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    coming together where you don't need to even later switch networks or know even which network which application is on because you have a single View kind of across all of the web three and you're able to transact with them and kind of move assets and value so the benefit that we bring with near is that over past year we've been really focused on bringing applications that have a lot of users right and so we focused on uh sweatcoin and Kai chain which you know have massive install

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    basis s coin over 150 million installs of their main application King is pre-installed on Oppo and xiaomi phones uh and has over 8 million uh monthly actives with like 2.2 daily actives because they're on your home screen we have play Amber which is uh kind of mini games as well as hot that launched recently actually it's 4 million now uh that you know is a telegram viral telegram bot that allows to access web 3 and so the idea is all of this applications with all this users Now

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    open up their users to transact across all web 3 and their users don't need to know they already don't fully know that they're using near that was kind of the benefit of how bu near was designed and now they actually can access all of web3 without thinking about it so this is all you know seems very abstract so what is it really kind of use cases that uh you can achieve right so I mentioned obviously using applications SC web 3 but I think the core interesting applications and again

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    you'll hear from some of them today are being able to transact across all chains right again the interoperability of protocol of web 3 right now is binance right if you want to send something from one chain to another you're probably going to use binance before other like uh Bridges just because it's integr like way more integrated than any actually individual Bridges and so binance provides this multichain Dex well

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    multi-chain exchange right that is but it is fully custodial and uh has it set of its own limitations and so a multichain Dax that uses this technology can actually achieve uh an experience where even though we literally launch in Layer Two right now right um on our own laptop you should be able to start using you know and transacting with it right away because chain signatures already

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    can send transactions to it um so you'll have an ability to kind of start interacting with all of web 3 uh from a single place there's applications which are you know bringing Bitcoin for example and being able to transact uh across it with this blue here we have applications that trying to do lending and in general defi for nons smart contract blockchains um and going Beyond right as we think of you know true consumer applications it you know they will launch in different places but it

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    should be accessible for all consumers across web 3 and so this is what we really enabling here so kind of to you know to contrast this right now we're in this world where you know we have fragmented experience you know if you're trying to use optimistic rollup you probably have some fun stock withdrawing you have uh you know figuring out how much gas tokens you should have on different chains uh you know lots of wallets and uh like you don't even know where your money is like

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    I keep like trying to find things for example you know Miss air drops like not you know not all tools support all chains and really with chain abstraction we trying to make it so you know you can swap anything uh on any chain even if it's just launched you have uh you know all portfolio aggregated which you need you know data aggregation and uh you can you know leverage your BDC in other

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    places with kind of a uh Bitcoin layer twos um and so you have kind of this ability to access all web three from one place now I'll just mention that for near chain abstraction is you know it's important step it brings a lot of unity to the web 3 and for us it's kind of something that we've been thinking from the start but at the same time the long-term goal is really to bring the

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    full capability of modern technology and make itself Sovereign that's why we've been talking a lot about operating system and kind of IDE of the self- soverign operating system blockchain operating system that really allows you to kind of have control over your data assets and and Power of Choice power of governance and so all of those pieces coming together also require AI um and

37. 17:43

    uh I'm not going to go too deep into this if you're interested we have at bidia tomorrow chat with v alic as well as um few other things uh over next um few days I'm also talking about things that web3 doesn't want you to know about AI so so uh stop by soul but just to give you a really high level what web 3 and I stack presents is really a combination of user own data user own AI which again for those who are not familiar right now you're pretty much

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    giving all your data to someone uh there is a kind of model that runs that is controlled by a centralized party and they're deciding what you see and they like it can be coming out from a model it can be coming out from an Advertiser it can be coming out from everything else you obviously have this trustless interaction blockchain experience with chain abstraction and you have the experiences right uh that are pretty much generated for you uh kind of on the

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    Fly by your AI model based on the coordination of that's happening so uh you know join other talks to learn more about this so I'll just uh encourage everyone to assemble here for the chain abstraction and you know we'll we'll have an amazing day of talks here uh to dive in into this thank you