The Next Phase of Advancing Chain Abstraction

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1. 0:09

   hi thank you thank you everyone for coming I hope uh you had a great week so far we're kicking off the chain abstraction day and uh I think it's really exciting to see how this kind of movement been evolving over past I guess like 8 nine months um and so yeah I'm I'm excited to talk about kind of some of the next phase that uh we're seeing and some of the applications uh which some of you are building uh as well as you know then listen in on all of your

2. 0:40

   presentations to kind of see how things are advancing in more detail so the kind of one of the like the taglines we started uh chain abstraction idea was that your dabs aren't real right most of the kind of applications that built right now have been just a thin interface over a smart contract requiring user to understand in detail what's going on the whole process of transaction processing have a wallet being able to set up everything and it's like completely unusable right for

3. 1:14

   people who are not willing to spend you know all of their time on crypto Twitter and so the kind of process of this obviously being very evolutionary we have a lot of different people trying to find what's the best way to build a blockchain trying the best way to build middleware wallets it's kind of extremely exciting to see you know lots of people trying different options but

4. 1:38

   what it led to is like unusable kind of experience right you have if you're launching on one chain you only targeting users of that chain right and every now the new chain launching you only have like a subset of users you have fragmented you know liquidity you fragmented user experience you never know where apps are you never know like is this a real app as well you have kind of problem finding uh them and as a developer you have trouble like okay am

5. 2:08

   I launching multiple apps on multiple chains am I launching multiple apps like how am I branding them as a user right I have you know dozen of wallet providers you know each wallet has like probably a bunch of different addresses in them you know I need to like remember do I have like which token is on which chain for gas figure out how to uh you know bridge that which Bridge actually works which bridge is going to get stuck and at the

6. 2:33

   end like users just want you know make money and have fun right that's like at the end the kind of the the summary of of our of our needs and so like understanding all of the details is not something that like people are set out to do when they hear about web3 and crypto and so you know how do we go from like I need to wallet in every chain there's like more chains launching so I need more wallets to how do we kind of defragment and Abstract all of this and really enable users to have one

7. 3:05

   experience and interact with everything and so that's kind of where we started with chain abstraction movement it's really exciting to see more and more people joining I was actually talking with some investors and said like they said they have you know three to five projects pitching them chain abstraction every day now right which is went from you you know last year when I was talking about this idea to investors they were like oh this is not happening like this is 5 years later you know

8. 3:31

   nobody cares about user experience it's going to be all you know more layer twos that's a meta right and so it's really exciting to see actually this is happening now so and obviously like all of the things youd hear about right there's a lot of technology that goes under the hood to make it happen right because we want uh a way to you know unite liquidity which across different

9. 3:53

   chains means we need a way to like settle things off chain and then settle them on chain so we need intents we cration you know obviously we have a lot of different uh kind of layer tooth so we need a way to uh kind of modularize this stack and so all of the parts right and underneath providing towards this vision of chain abstraction so for us when we started in 2018 uh it was starting from a very much perspective of how do we solve a problem

10. 4:26

    right we started because we wanted to do crowd crowd sourcing and pay people and it was really strange when you think like if I want to pay somebody for work on blockchain they first need to go and acquire some crypto to start working on a platform that's a very weird logic right and so we were thinking about chain abstraction kind of appli to near on how do we make it transparent to the user that you know they set up an

11. 4:53

    account they start using it it feels like web 2 but it has all this properties it's available everywhere it's you know self custody it's user ownership and at the same time you know the transaction fees can be paid by the application if needed and you have kind of all of the complexity hidden from them so that's you know we didn't have a chain abstraction as a word but we were trying to kind of bring some of this concept we had account abstraction we

12. 5:17

    had a lot of kind of how do we abstract the blockchain and now in 2022 it was pretty clear there's a lot of chains going on right and we kind of went from you know one chain will win in uh logic to well actually there going to be use cases for different chains there are going to be different applications and different places so how do we actually unite all of that right we started with

13. 5:41

    decentralized front ends then we had you know how do we unboard users easier with fast do and then that kind of trickled into uh chain signatures which are how do we make it that one account can actually transact across our chains and so that's really what kind of this evolution of thinking been happening again wasin the same vision wasin the same thought process and so uh kind of

14. 6:05

    the team at pagota have been building out the NPC Network that is able to initiate transactions on other chains where those addresses are controlled by MPC Network in a way you know turning kind of part of the near Network into a custodian of the assets on other chains now the way it works right there's a whole uh kind of multiparty computation uh Network going on um and you know you

15. 6:30

    can have nodes joining and leaving maintaining the same public key and kind of through that the same with the same derivation the same addresses across all chains and uh we planning to have this on mayet in August uh 2024 now if this all seems too abstract right uh I will go into some examples right so first of all you know we all love dii and we've had this kind of mindset that you know each chain needs to its own defi right each chain

16. 7:04

    needs to have its own decks its own Landing protocol maybe multiple decks as they going to compete and this all leads to you know more and more fragmentation more and more kind of uh Le kind of user needing to navigate like okay where am I training and you do have some aggregators but then aggregators still only work on one chain and kind of with chain abstraction I think it's time to change the mind set

17. 7:29

    it's time to go away from a chain specific def to Def to really being able to transact across all chain at once not needing to think what specific um kind of underlying set of uh platforms you're using so we have quite a few projects building this space right I'm going to just call out few uh it starts with diffuse which is a multi-chain DEX it's uh kind of generic OTC marketplace where you're able to transact the whole account right let's say you have a Bitcoin account and you have ethereum

18. 8:03

    account and you can pretty much swap them right what this enables to do you can actually trade a whole set of assets at once right you can have ethereum account with you know loged CRV with you know maybe some nfts and you can trade that for some Bitcoin with Mark B c20s and ordinals right you can have a very generic kind of setup and it's actually based on intent type uh architecture

19. 8:26

    where you just uh indicate what you want uh to receive and then there are solvers that are able to figure out how to facilitate that right they can be arbin through centralized exchanges they can be arbing through some of the local D5 Primitives on the specific chains this allows you to really have this kind of one architecture one interface one kind of way to express what you want to trade and have a whole kind of set of offchain actors to go and transact similarly you

20. 8:57

    can have lending right where you can deposit ass asss on any chain right you deposit Bitcoin you borrow uh usdc on salana right that seems like a reasonable thing to have and uh yand is working on that really to enable this kind of a singular experience where you don't need again to think about like oh I'm borrowing here but the you know the balance is there like I need to move the balance I need to bridge it you know what's security of this additional uh

21. 9:21

    additional bridging uh similarly you have reaking right you can kind of uh use the staking on all of the chains uh to pretty much create uh security for other be that layer 2os or other application that need that are running uh of chain uh omn laabs is also working on multichain decks uh a little in a little bit different design so the other side obviously Bitcoin has seen a major Resurgence and we have a bunch of applications that kind of been excited to leverage this

22. 9:53

    technology to apply to bitcoin right so we have uh Babylon that building rest with Bitcoin and so Atlas is kind of working with them to create liquid restak and make that asset potentially available across other chains uh you have ref Finance pretty much bringing some of the assets from Bitcoin to near through trust minimized Bridge you have East blue building kind of you know

23. 10:16

    application platform you have Paras who in nft Marketplace that you know you're able to deposit ordinals and trade them on near at near speed and near uh prices finally there's a kind of design where again as a user you don't want to go in like hunt uh and set up accounts on every chain so you have application like you have wallets now that are offering you to be able to transact and log in into Apps on other chains without needing to think about details about

24. 10:49

    bridging about gas fees right so B is allowing you to do this through natural language you can say like hey you know buy me a token on that other chain uh then you know it constructs the transactions it uses change signatures it kind of executes all that and pays for transaction fees you have hot which already has actually 600,000 users across Bas and salana uh transacting through their uh version of chain signatures as well as you have sweat uh which is going to be launching with chain signatures to transact on uh B&B

25. 11:20

    so this is really just bringing you this experiences that we've been talking about uh in kind of variety of ways right hot is inside telegram sweat is a mobile app uh B is a web app that you know has one of the easiest on boardings in web 3 now obviously you've heard of AI and if you you know just dropped into ACC there's been a lot of AI events and uh there's a whole kind of user owned AI stack that's been built uh we have kind

26. 11:50

    of uh a lot of projects we working with on this and they can benefit from using this because they can actually tap in into all of the other chains they can process payments across all of them uh again what bid is doing with natural language transaction formation is extremely important because it's really hard to navigate kind of blockchain space uh but in natural language you can say like hey build me an index of you

27. 12:13

    know top 20 tokens that launched in last month and by volume and you know buy $10 worth of right this is like something that you would require probably a developer to construct you manually but you can actually do this with kind of natural language interface um and obviously there's quite a few people working on how do we index all this data across all this chains and give you

28. 12:36

    recommendations on what to do you know what is a new assets what is a new fun things to do across all chains so lots and lots of interesting things happening uh now one of the things that we've been thinking about is okay well if we think that we have this multichain world right we need then multichain assets we need something that lives everywhere and so the idea of omn token is that you can use kind of uh what you deployed on near

29. 13:08

    and then you have ERC 20s SPL maybe even brc2 available across other chains and importantly you have a way to transfer it between different chains through kind of unified interface right now this not going to be rc20 right the rc20 does not support uh kind of an address that uh has a chain address and it doesn't support fees uh but it is something that ethereum themselves are talking about right there's a 3770 metalic talked about it um kind of a few weeks ago that this is like

30. 13:41

    extremely important where you should be able to send you know somebody else money without caring which other which chain their address is on so imagine you can just you know you're sitting on salana and you just enter base colon ill black dragon. eth and it routes the money right you don't need to think about like the bridge you know how is this going to be navigating there's no bridge between cell and base so you need to go through ethum like all of that

31. 14:06

    should not be your concern so that's kind of what the omn toen design that we're working on as well again based on chain signatures underlying Tech is toward now the other thing I wanted to talk about is so we talked about a lot about multichain but there's actually a lot of interesting things you can do if you have this technology on near itself right near account abstraction is really powerful you're able to have many

32. 14:30

    different keys with different permissions on an account the account is a smart contract you can program it in different ways but it's always been limiting because uh you can only have one one contract right so let's say you deployed a multi contract now if you want to deploy some other functionality you need to pretty much rewrite the smart contract add that functionality and redeploy it and what chain signatur is allowed to do is to have a smart

33. 14:54

    contract and then that smart contract has a key on your account right so to give you an example for example let's say there is a social recovery contract that you install social recovery which adds a specific key to your account and now when you want to recover your account let's say you lost access you know Apple banned you uh and your pass keys are not available anymore you're able to go to you know five of your

34. 15:18

    friends and tell them hey you know uh click this link submit this uh approval and that smart contract is able to submit a transaction on your behalf to add a new key to rotate Keys similarly you can do this with subscriptions right you can have a subscription contract that uh like one of the challenges in general in web 3 so far been that we're not able to withdraw money from users accounts right you're not able to

35. 15:43

    authorize somebody to withdraw money and so we don't have the same kind of credit card system right where you just subscribe for you know $5 a month for some service um you need to like top it off every time you know submit a transaction and we don't have like good notification systems either so Now with uh chain signatures you're able to have a subscription contract you pretty much install this contracts key in your

36. 16:08

    account and now when you subscribe to something this contract can pretty much pull money out of your account or say that you don't have money and kind of cancel the subscription right so this is types of different experiences that you can now build with this intent execution is the same right you can have some complex intent to be then settled and executed on behalf of your account by a smart contract multi you know upgradability all of the things that

37. 16:33

    before would require a contract on your account and kind of management around that is now can be done externally and for those who familiar with kind of near uh enhancement proposals we had this idea of account extensions this is pretty much implementation of account extensions but in a way that uh uses uh chain signatures so I also would mention that you know there's no chain abstraction without abstracting the user interface

38. 16:57

    right and so that is a really good example of combining all of the different applications and experiences into one place where you can have kind of one account and you can transact across all of them uh so if you haven't tried out dab dab before check it out they have I think 17 different layer tws over7 different applications available um and I think on mode right now is it generating like 90% of all transactions

39. 17:23

    uh through their interface finally if you're you know if you're developer and you're not building a chain obstru yet there's quite a few requests for projects I'm sure there's actually um more folks here like Kendall and David here who can uh suggest more ideas but I'm actually excited about the decentralized stable coin because um you know you can start with a maker design but you can go to Athena design which is uh uses short positions on other uh per exchanges but you can have pretty much a

40. 17:53

    multic collateral stable coin that's able to leverage you know combination of all the collateral we have in the ecosystem balance it out have you know short positions if needed and issue a stable coin that's available through om token everywhere so you can actually use it on every chain uh we have kind of you know a lot of opportunity on bitcoin I'll let you know folks to talk with Scandal about that and uh obviously more wallets that are able to kind of

41. 18:19

    interact with specific chains uh that using this chain abstraction uh is definitely needed in kind of Integrations uh with World connect for example so I'll just leave you with this meme you know done being a fragmented web 3 where you know you have lots of wallets you need Bridges you need to figure out uh kind of when your fund's going to get unstuck from the bridge uh be a chain abstraction uh you know interact with

42. 18:44

    all chains in one interface be able to see everything in one place and uh access kind of everything uh across across the web 3 thank you and hope you enjoy the day today