The Future Is Frictionless: How Chain Abstraction Will Defragment Web3 | Chris Donovan - NEAR Fdn.

background and then maybe we can go in a little bit more depth as we progress sure um hi everyone um I'm super jet lagged by the way I I'm kind of amazed I'm I'm awake even um so chain abstraction uh right well for us it is all about a vision of abstracting away the current complexity in blockchain environments particularly multi-chain blockchain environments where right now you know users need to be maintaining multiple sets of private Keys multiple wallet clients they need to be thinking about bridging and managing gas fees all of this kind of stuff which is a real barrier for adoption on the user side um and I like to think you know could my grandma do this stuff and right now absolutely not um I mean she's actually pretty techsavvy for a 98- year old but she she she couldn't handle this um and then on the developer side right now when developers are choosing where to build they have to make a bunch of tradeoffs and they're subject to lots of different constraints because we're in a pretty modular State and a fragmented state in web 3 right now and that means that you know resources like users like liquidity like particular kind of types of Dev tools for example are kind of siloed in different places and so when you make a choice about where to build you typically are sacrificing one or more of those things and and our aim is therefore to try and unify all of these different disperate silos together kind of like a connective tissue so that developers don't have to make those types of um tradeoffs anymore um thank you and maybe we could break down a bit more what the issue is here that you're trying to solve um where are the like specific pain points and how does chain abstraction SL near fit into that sure so maybe starting with like thinking about the current state of the industry and I mentioned just in the previous um response that we're in a very kind of modular state right now you know we have a bunch of disperate ecosystems but then we also have um projects that have actually been breaking up the the blockchain layers themselves you know settlement execution data availability into separate kind of modular offerings which is great for scalability but it creates that fragmentation that I mentioned both for users um and also for developers and in our view if we want this technology to be being used by billions of people we can't have the infrastructure being a barrier to adoption so what we're trying to do is just remove as many barriers to adoption as possible and also at the same time help all of us as as members of this industry collaborate a little bit more effectively together you know I think tribalism is something that is typically can be quite fierce in our industry and I think it is in a lot of of nent Industries in general people feel like they really have to have sharp elbows really competing over you know a small slice of the pie but actually our view is if we can um if we can move past that mindset but also help um create the technical substrate that makes collaboration easier it'll be better for the industry as a whole and what makes n specifically the best to facilitate this like um well that's a great question and maybe I'll start at at a higher level not thinking near specific but just more kind of the general technical features and innovations that you would need to enable the chain abstraction future and so the first thing is what we need to have is a unified security layer between different blockchain environments and by that I mean if you think about uh the state of the industry prior to zero knowledge for example right you would need to rely from a security perspective on a bunch of decentralized validators to maintain the state whereas now with with zero knowledge you can actually you know you can prove um the state of a particular chain you know on a single server right so you do not need to be relying on disperate groups of decentralized validators in all in all cases which means that for developers um who historically would have had to choose between either operating on a pre-existing shared large chain infrastructure or even building their own chain which is expensive and complicated now they can actually just spin up a chain running on a single server and they can use their knowledge proof to actually you know um publish the proof on a on another piece of blockchain infrastructure so that's the unified security layer we then think about um what we call the identity layer and this is um the ability for users through a single account to actually transact and control multiple addresses in multiple different blockchain environments and so in the near ecosystem we're working on something called account abstraction which productized that vision and in practice that means that from your near account you can actually sign transactions and control Assets in a whole bunch of different blockchain environments like so you know if you've got Bitcoin you want to move around you've got stuff on ethereum whatever you can do that from your near account um which we think is super powerful because that's one of the biggest barriers to adoption right now um and then the last uh piece at a high level is um the what we call the experience layer which is effectively from a from a user interface perspective do I need to be jumping in and out of different environments different applications am I going to you know centralized exchanges am I going to dexes am I going to to different daps or can I do all of this from the same user interface and we think that it needs to be the same user interface because right now web 2 experiences kind of do that for you right and it's the convenience um and the ease of use is is kind of what's helped web 2 scale and be so successful and if we want to match that and we want to get to the same levels of adoption we have to kind of meet them um on the same terms from a kind of convenience and usability perspective but then talking specifically about near and I'll cat all of this by saying well two things one you know we view chain abstraction as a collective effort so there are lots of places that chain abstraction is being worked on and and we're just one of them and and I we think that's great because we want lots of people trying to solve this problem because it's so important for the industry um the second caveat I will give is that I know my way around the technology but I'm not deeply technical I used to be a lawyer I'm a I'm a reformed lawyer um but I will walk I I'll I'll do my best to walk the group through the kind of different technical pillars in the ne EOS system that we're working on right now so there are three um pillars basically the first is what we call account abstraction which is actually a native feature of near accounts since the protocol was launched back in 2020 and what that basically means is that near accounts map to human readable addresses so lila. n chris. n for example rather than a public um keyh so effectively accounts are like smart contract containers on near and you can put as many different Keys as you want within that smart contract and those keys can have different permissions for different things which creates quite a versatile account environment uh and it's also typically gives you more security and granularity as well and one of the cool features that we launch last year that was kind of a stepping stone to this vision is the um onboarding um onboarding experience called fast or which basically allows users to create um a near account in less than a second and it's secured using biometric pass keys and it basically matches that web 2 account creation user experience it's super fast it's super slick and all of the blockchain stuff happens under the hood and users don't have to know that it's even there and and again that's kind of part of the vision of um of chain abstraction so that near account model is is one pillar there are two others one is chain signatures and that is the ability um through MPC nodes in the near Network for near accounts to control and sign transactions on other remote accounts in other blockchain ecosystems and that's the really big uh Innovation it's also the most complicated piece of of the puzzle as well but again for us that's how you get to that state of you know one account to do all of your web three stuff and and that's the the sort of simplification piece and then the last component is what we're calling intent relays and this component um is designed to effectively transfer and execute based on the intent of users and and abstracting Away the underlying complexity so when you traditionally transact on a multi-chain basis like I mentioned you got to manage all these different keys and wallets and bridging and all this kind of stuff gas fees in different Native tokens which can be super complicated right even I find it difficult sometimes or I find it so tedious that I just don't bother because it it takes too long um and so the intent relayer what it does is it helps to eliminate particularly the management of gas and the kind of uh exchange of tokens on the destination chain it kind of captures that process and so for us in V1 of account um aggregation what happens is that the near accounts um rather than mapping directly to these remote addresses on different blockchains they actually map to the intent relayer and then that relayer then controls the remote accounts underneath and the relayer um I guess it kind of processes all that transactional complexity on behalf of the user um um and again I think if you if you can't solve that then again you're not really giving users that seamless multi-chain experience you you you made the point of um we spoke a little bit about user experience um I'm wondering if you can compare the way that this would look to something that we may use already in web 2 um I know you said your you're you're going to be able to move assets from whether it be Bitcoin ethereum or your near tokens how how would that look in terms of the app it's a great question so I think well first of all it would mean that you know right now if you want to transact on a m chain basis you're coming in and out of a bunch of different application environments um and and that's not just wallets but it's also sometimes I don't know centralized exchanges if you want to do kind of transacting in real time on a multi-chain basis right now that's just about the only place you can do it effectively so in a chain abstraction world you would do everything from one place first of all um which is which is great secondly you you would not need to think necessarily unless you wanted to and sometimes there's good reasons for it but generally you would prefer not to have to bridge assets at any time because bridging is a real pain in the backside it's also a huge security risk and it's also quite expensive so now because you're able to to control these remote addresses in these assets on their native chains you don't need to worry about trying to Bridge and wrap and all that kind of stuff but the user isn't going to see that backend stuff I just see my user just so for example maybe like to give a um like a use case example let's say I own a board um a board a um nft on ethereum right and I want to sell that on openc I would do all of that from my near account I'd see my bord um nft in my in my near account um you know in my in my um kind of wallet experience on on the near blockchain um I would be able to set up the sale set the sale price press execute and then all of the components and there's quite a few steps that happen under the hood for that like you've got to consider um preparing the eth payload for you know for the um the costs of transacting on ethereum for example um and and that all happens under the hood and then and as far as the user is concerned I've sold my bord I've got my eth profits and it's all just happened in one place okay and we think that's like an enormous user experience change from what exists today absolutely so I think I understand from a user perspective what trained abstraction means but if I were developer how does it benefit me and okay um well lots of different ways so let's take well let's take for example a feature of the near ecosystem right now so one of the things we've been pretty good at I think partly because we're trying we've always since the since the the the protocol's Inception we've been trying to abstract away complexity like make adoption easy so we've manage to attract a lot of monthly active users to the ecosystem we have about 14 14 a half million monthly active users um in the near ecosystem right now and for developers not in the near ecosystem that pool of users is really valuable potentially you like that's potentially like a gold mine of of of user traffic and user interactions new customers all of this kind of stuff and with chain signatures and account aggregation if I'm building AAP in a different blockchain environment let's say salana what I can do is in my wallet selector page I can you know sign in with Nia and then my users can actually you know get you well then sorry my um my project then gets access to all of the users in the near ecosystem as a result right which is super powerful but the same goes for things like um access to liquidity too right so if I've got um you know I don't need to think about picking an environment because it happens to have liquidity for the use case that I need I can access it from anywhere now which means that I don't need to compromise and I don't need to think well I'd rather build over there because I think the developer toolkit is much more efficient and effective for me right but all the users are over there and all the liquidity is here and so how do I kind of uh square that Circle and and deal with the trade-offs I I don't have to do that anymore okay great so what is this you mentioned briefly that this might remove the necessity for Bridges what does this then mean for bridging well uh I mean it doesn't it doesn't eliminate bridging entirely there are sometimes good reasons why you might want to bridge assets so for example like ethereum is not a bad example ethereum is pretty expensive to move around on ethereum and if you just wrap it and put it on another chain you can then move it around much more cheaply and efficiently and sometimes even more quickly but in general terms and and I think if you speak to to folks you know that that are deep in the industry and deep in the in the ecosystem um bridging is like I said a real pain in the backside and and bridges are always just terrible user experiences and typically also that massive liability vectors like you know they're they're where if hackers are on the prow that's what they tend to focus on that they tend to be really big honey pots they have lots of liquidity trapped in them um so again because you're you're not needing to worry about pulling assets from their conic or native chain you can just move them around you know you're controlling them from over here but they're staying in their local environment you don't need to about bridging anymore and that makes it faster and also you know cheaper and more secure to do the transactions that would other otherwise take you like 15 Steps and two hours and cost a lot in in gas fees and and and exchange fees and all of that kind of stuff okay great in terms of interest and adoption for this I know it's fairly early stages but what have you experienced and what are you seeing so far yeah so we've so we had our um chain abstraction Summit yesterday um and I don't know if any of you any of you went but we actually had uh one of the first demos of chain signatures in action so uh sweat um economy which is one of the biggest projects in our ecosystem which is a move to to earn um protocol you know you take steps you earn tokens which is which is great they actually demonstrated um a feature where users can transact and settle on binance Smart chain from their sweat wallet which is a a near account based model okay um and we have a few other projects so we have um Cosmos Kai Ching which is like a shopping loyalty environment and they're actually a really interesting case because so they moved from a web to payment rail structure so stripe to the near protocol to save on transaction fees because stripe charges a pretty high transaction fee um and also is not particularly fast relative to the near protocol um so they're exploring chain signatures to broaden access for their user base to other ecos systems other liquidity other opportunities and we also have um play Ember which is a hyper casual mobile gaming um project they have millions of of multi users as well and they're also hoping to broaden the experience environment for their users by implementing this technology cool what sort of challenges have you faced when trying to push this forward and get people interested have you noticed that there's competition I know you mentioned earlier that this isn't a competitive thing every everyone should be on board and it's like you play for each other but H how does that look from your side of things sure well I think first of all just from a technical implementation perspective like this stuff is pretty hard um and people have been trying to figure it out for a while although as I said we feel like a lot of different pieces are coming together in quite an exciting way right now um and we do have um stuff that's live on testet we have um documentation around account abstraction and chain signatures that if anyone's interested I encourage to go look at it we've got got some telegram groups with developers that are specifically thinking about and working on these um these topics which is which is great and these are people from loads of different ecosystems which is amazing um so the technical side is is hard but we feel solvable I think the bigger challenge interestingly has been helping people change the way they think about operating in web 3 like from this tribal mindset of my chain is the best chain and and I'm competing with all of you to let's work together to solve this Collective problem and it and it's genuinely mutually beneficial like if we connect all of these things together it's a better environment like I said for users and developers everywhere doesn't matter where you're building doesn't matter where your users are it's it's a better experience and if we want web 3 to be being used by billions of people around the world which is definitely our aspiration we think you have to have this stuff and do you do you think that other chains have that perspective I think where well I think it probably it depends on who you ask right I think some folks absolutely and definitely we've noticed a desire perhaps during the previous um bare market and as we move into this new cycle of folks just wanting to be more open and collaborative in general because they recognize that you know Rising tide lifts all boats and we might as well help each other try and be more successful um but then equally and this by the way includes folks even in the near ecosystem there are folks who kind of say well hang on a minute I want to bring these people to build on the near protocol I don't want them to be over on salant or whatever and we have to try and help them view those other Reco systems not as competitors but as collaborators and that's like being honest it's just going to take time but you can see that it's improving from where it was I think so and I think the use cases help cuz it feels a little bit magical to ex you know to kind of go from this painful user experience to just like a couple of clicks and it all just happens under the hood like really it feels magical it feels similar to how it feels when you use these things and everything is just so seamless and you're kind of even like even I'm still occasionally astounded by how easy or how kind of magical even the user experience can be and I think we're just beginning to have the building blocks to begin to replicate that in web 3 and that will just help people see the benefit wonderful that's all we have time for but thank you so much Chris appreciate it thanks guys thanks everyone