Why Chain Abstraction is Inevitable

Transcript

good morning everybody today's episode of the rollup is with Ethan AKA Tabasco from particle Network today we are talking about how particle makes chain abstraction easy through Universal accounts before we get into today's episode please enjoy a word from our sponsors enjoy cartey is your home for app specific rollups at the Forefront of developing new tools and platforms that enhance the capabilities of blockchain Technology cartey enables applications that are flexible and built to scale build on a

full Linux environment and use traditional software libraries but in blockchain development go to cars.io that's cares. to learn more about building your own app chain today welcome back to the rollup today we have a podcast about chain abstraction which we kind of think is like this recipe for if you have all these modular ingredients chain abstraction is almost like putting them into a cookbook and allowing them to work together and giving a a functional ux um this weekend I overheard a couple of my friends talking about like onboarding to crypto and the biggest thing has consistently been the the ux so I think that that's that's kind of be the focus of today's conversation with Ethan also known as Tabasco from

particle network uh um so yeah think today we're going to try to Define chain exraction talk about some of the layers of the stack talk about kind of this like intersection of modularity and chain abstraction and uh yeah maybe ask Rob about his golf game um Rob welcome to the show sir as always to 49 on nine holes so it's on Pace for under 100 which means it's progress from the 113 that I shot the time before that um yeah man I mean I'm glad you're dude that modular cookbook is is really Chef I I can that's that's real Chef material right there um and I tend to agree I I I tend to think that

modularity in this unbundling leads to a potential issue of fragmentation which chain abstraction uh could solve by linking all of these pieces together uh and and really tying everything together into a nice fully fleshed out meal that tastes really nice for the end user uh comprised of all these modular ingredients um Ethan welcome to the rollup cooking show uh it's absolute pleasure to have you on and can't wait uh to see what you got cooking man welcome yeah I appreciate it thanks for having me on I'm I'm excited to uh to cook a modular meil with you guys today I think there's a lot of interesting angles chain instraction it's I mean you guys basically had a pretty good analogy

for it there I really do think that as we'll get into it later chain abstraction is a very good mechanism for kind of engaging modular expansion and actually enabling it to proliferate in a way that's sustainable and kind of ready for consumers so I'm sure we'll get in all the Angles and a little bit but um yeah we're really excited about this and I think it's uh I mean it's one of the largest narratives right now for a good reason I think it has lot of really good practical implications so looking forward to getting into with with you guys here yeah I mean that was fully off the off the top of of our heads I mean that there was no that just came to me as I was in introducing Rob to his own podcast you guys put out a really interesting article um kind of defining

chain abstraction I think that's a really good place to start like it's it's kind of a weird term even the word abstraction itself is almost like something that you don't really hear in I guess like the normal day-to-day world but in crypto it kind of makes sense like abstracting away complexities so yeah you guys put out this article um defining chain abstraction I think that'd be a good place to start um and maybe we can talk about a little bit of the why behind that and you know uh set the foundation for what chain abstraction really means yeah so I guess I can start with maybe kind of like a simple explanation of like what CH struction is and I'll get into the definition that we proposed because CH instraction as you know as uh most people have kind of heard of loosely um has an interesting idea attached to it

but one of the issues is that there's not really um like a structured or like rigid way of really understanding what chain obstruction is from like a semantic standpoint so what we did with this article is we basically introduced like here's like a a rigid understanding of like this is exactly how you can Define train abstraction in like seven or eight words but to start with like a general overview you know uh I I guess to even take another step back with some context you know web 3 for a while has kind of started um moving into this idea of you know a thousand rollups 10,000 rollups where like actually the future especially like within the ethereum eem is that scaling happens through the means of like you know Sovereign blockchains or rollups or things that um are not really confined within one

single modular blockchain because or not modular monolithic blockchain because what happened for a long time is that there's kind of this idea um especially you know a few years back that there was going to be one blockchain that was going to win the blockchain race or one or two blockchains that are going to yield all the adoption we're going to be the the the state machine for for all of crypto um and you know I mean you've you have all the the major contenders um ethereum V salon has been like a big conversation recently and all stuff but like for a long time this idea really was that like there's going to be a few crypto um currencies and a few blockchains that were really going to be the the main ones kind of like you know search Eng or something like that but people realize

pretty quickly that this is not a I mean I won't I won't like be too too cross I guess but I say people realize it like it's not a very sustainable way to to scale a lot of time especially like within the ethereum osstem because ethereum itself is very limited in terms of what you can build purely on top of ethereum itself and we saw this with a lot of issues as people start building applications and even like you had you know side chains or whatever like other um even l1s that experienced similar issues and um started scaling alternative means which almost always especially in the ethereum ecem resulted in scaling via application specific blockchains um you even saw this like you know a lot like I think Avalanche was a pretty good first Contender to this that like really embrac this idea of app chains with subnets for example

and of course you've had rollups for a long time in in ethereum eem um now have this idea of like l2s l3s and even like Sovereign Sovereign blockchain Sovereign rollup like this um there's a lot of like really interesting methods to scaling ethereum and ultimately all boils down to this idea that we're moving in the direction of having a very high volume of blockchains so you know thousand 10,000 rollups um even l1s l2s that create this ultimate issue of fragmentation now fragmentation specifically refers to the idea that as a user there's number one liquidity fragmentation so my liquidity my balances across chains are fragmented within certain silid blockchains so if I have 100 usct on ethereum then this UC I can only use it on ethereum I can't use

this on arbitrase or whatever because they're different environments right so my value my balance is fragmented across every specific blockchain which is a big issue if we have 10,000 rollups as a user I can imagine requiring users to require them or to ask them to like cognitively manage balances across even 10 different chains let alone you know if they're using 100 applications um so this is a pretty major issue then further than this not only the fragmentation itself is that to like move balances across chain so if as a user if I don't want to deposit new funds on every application that I'm using across every chain then now I need to go and Bridge funds manually now bridging itself is a relatively in my opinion somewhat complicated and lowlevel primitive that we're requiring

users to do um and this has resulted in a lot of like sometimes security issues um on like more user facing Bridges um you have a lot of just like General friction some it can be slow it can be expensive stuff like this so from a user perspective there's a lot of issues around complexity with needing to move funds across chains and like just a lot that we're asking for them to manage cognitively their balances across chains so in any future where we want 10,000 rollups asking users to manage their balances across every world that they're using and Bridge across every world that they want to move funds across this is an inherently unsustainable and uh not a feasible way to scale web three so if we want andas just real quick I I was gonna

say uh prior to you just going forward on kind of where we're headed with the scale with bridging right now I I was kind of Ming around with you I think on a live stream about this where my current iteration or of chain abstraction is like I go on Rabbi and I go to an app that I know I have funds on a different chain on and then I just click the button and it says oh here just click here and you switch switch your network done boom and it knows where my funds are boom like that's just like that's actually like really freaking good like that makes that difference is a huge difference from like metamask to Rabbi um so like this next iteration where I think you you're about to kind of take us through with this definition of chain abstraction is

like even that but even abstracting it away like completely exactly yeah so like there has been like a lot of initial implementations all based around kind of this idea that you know there's a lot of blockchains that we're using and to reduce the friction or the fragmentation across These Chains which I think rabby is more cented around the friction I think you still have the issue of fragmentation but they they make it easier because that friction is reduced to some degree um but like the whole idea of chain abstraction like with this context establish is that a user should be able to interact across these 10,000 rollups these you know however many um new chains that are being created without needing to really know what chain that they're on or specifically like if we're going to get like you know more formal about it it's

really user should be able to interact across chains without the manual processes associated with this interaction so they shouldn't need to bridge across chains manually they shouldn't need to manage their balances across chain they don't shouldn't need to like think about where's my UCT how much do I need to bridge across chain H chain B chain C chain D to get you know this uh this balance on chain e to do this transaction they should just use applications and this can usually materialize in a way where users are actually unaware of the chains that they're using where they just deposit funds and then they go to whatever chains that they're leveraging app chain a app chain B Fain C whatever even like you know larger blockchains like ethereum and they just leverage applications and that's it so they don't need to manage where their balances are

they don't need to bridge they just have their funds and then they use it so this is a really big part of the whole chain abstraction idea which is ultimately kind of the separ ation of the infrastructure the underlying chains from the user experience which is um you know this idea of uh you know being able to use any application with your funds from any chain so this is like ultimately how chain instuction boils down it's kind of the um the streamlining of user experience across chains to where users are no longer bound to in ecosystem so actually the whole idea of chains themselves turns into what it should be originally in my opinion is like a a largely developer facing infrastructural component so users are now unaware or theoretically they don't need to be but in most cases they can be unaware of um you know I don't care what chain this

application is using it's up to the developer the developer should be focused on what chain they're using because that you know impacts the efficiency and the you know the resilience of their application so chains are transitioning under a chain instraction model from actually a largely user facing thing where users need to decide what chain do I want to deposit my funds on to what chain do I want to interact the ecosystem of what chain do I want to support to actually removing all of this and now chains are purely a developer facing thing where developers they choose what chain they want to use whether that's an existing kind of like more public blockchain or whether that's like their own app chain and they choose this based upon their the needs of their application not where are the users where are the liquidity and the users they don't even care about

choosing Chains It's not a part of their experience anymore they choose applications so this has a lot of really interesting applications that we can get into later in terms of like what this actually means for the eem But ultimately this is how you can understand train abstraction is purely just the removal of the confines of of specific blockchains from and users and allowing them to have this experience that exceeds um any specific chain into being a more kind of like Web Two like experience where they just have their balance they go to whatever application across any chain and they use it forget Bridges forget you know specific blockchains this is kind of the end of that so within our definition article going back to what I mentioned earlier which is that this idea of chain abstraction is used a lot now it's actually quite a popular narrative but

the problem is that there's not really a very rigid understanding of like what is chain abstraction what is not chain abstraction like is chain abstraction just like cross chain or is chain obstruction bridging or is CH abstraction message passing so to to clarify this what we did actually just a few days ago at particles we released an article um which kind of Dives really deeply into exactly what chain abstraction is and how you can understand it as as a user as an investor as a developer um and we kind of proposed this one sentence definition that we believe encompasses chain obstruction pretty well which is to Simply a user experience exempt from the manual processes required to interact multiple chains so it's basically time a user experience exempt from the manual processes of interacting between chains

basically yeah b a user experience exemp from almost yeah just like two words there just a user experience exempt from the manual processes required interact with multiple chains so you can understand these man processes ET exactly needing to manage multiple balances stuff like that so that's chain abstraction from like the broadest sense possible like that's the biggest idea that everybody body who's working in chain abstraction is effectively working towards exactly yeah so the definition we chose doesn't specify what technology will enable chain abstraction because actually I believe it was um Conex who originally had this idea and I think they expressed it really well I guess they're not connects anymore it's Ever Clear um and they have this idea that chain

abstraction is defined as an experience so chain abstraction is actually not a specific technology or set of technologies that we can use as a definition rather CH is better as purely an experience that we can as a vertical as an industry work towards right so this experience is defined by you know what I mentioned you know an experience that is ultimately exempt from any you know manual processes that you have to usually do to interact with multiple chains um so it's basically taking this this experience and adapting it to the same experience that you have interacting with a single chain right so it's like whatever you typically do with ethereum you can now do this like across the entire ecosystem and it feels like you're just using ethereum or just using Arch or whatever um but you have this this kind like single chain ux and so I

really like the idea that kind of conect propos a while back which is that chain struction is ultimately an experience and this is how it can be defined this how it can be understood that way as vertical we can build towards an experience and not confine it to its only intents or its only signature aggregation or it's only a obstruction or whatever it's a lot of different Technologies and there's a lot of different approaches to it um so this is why we chose a definition and it's pretty interesting vertical right now and of course there's a lot of people working towards it yeah we had uh Leah on from from Ever Clear here and uh it it was a live stream with around interoperability and I remember a lot of uh the the core idea is that it's it's like we we know what it should feel like

and so it's this experience that we can kind of like picture in our minds of of how we would experience using these onchain applications and we know that like we want it to be easy seamless it really shouldn't take a lot of like switching rpcs bridging chains it should a lot of that should just be happening behind the scenes and so I think chain abstraction like just to kind of reiterate what I remember hearing there was that we know what it should feel like but we don't know how it how it works or how it will work and so I think when when we untangle like okay you know we all kind of like know what this experience should feel like how it how like we will interact with it and then we kind of untangle like what

needs to happen underneath the hood to achieve such an experience um that's when it gets like really really messy uh there's a lot of moving parts and so to untangle some of that like there's there's a couple of things that like come to mind where you know I think one of these ideas of chain abstraction is to remove bridging make it so that you know we can just click an application and we want to do some interaction and then the rest of that happens kind of underneath the hood on our behalf and so to achieve that my mind is like all right well I know what I want that to feel like but does that mean that like you know in order to remove bridging does that does like all of the liquidity to be in one pool and

we draw from it like what are if we were to break this down from a more like practical standpoint of implementation right you know how are we going to achieve this ideal experience that we can all sort of like feel like we know what we want how do we end up actually going about and achieving that um you guys have done work alongside some of like the more research oriented groups like The Cake working group how do you how are you seeing implementation work with some of the other chain abstraction projects um yeah ultimately like how are how are you seeing this play out on a practical basis yeah it's a good question um and I think first of all you mentioned kind of the removal of

bridges and I think it's important to um to specify I forget who said I think it was somebody from from Lei today or I don't know if that's how you pronounce it I always pronounce it incorrectly but from lii Lei um they mentioned they posted this on Twitter today about like how one thing about train abstraction that people usually consider to be like the removal of bridges when actually I think train abstraction is is better understood as like actually Bridges to a pretty significant degree are still maintained so you know um leafi um skip all these different kind of like more bridging focused organizations which kind of facilitate cross transactions these aren't lost at all like the like transction isn't necessarily a replacement of this it's an abstraction of that right exact it's so that the users aren't the ones that

are pulling the levers to take a bridge it's so that those bridges are still taken but it's abstracted away from the user perspective exactly yeah so it's basically like you know you said it's the the removal of the bridges from the user experience so that rather these are definitely still used under the hood you still have like a lot of message Bridges hyper layers here all these guys um as well as like more token based Bridges and and these exist but unbeknownst to the user right so this is actually underneath the the user experiences handled by Chain extraction protocols now there's a few ways that this is usually handled um for for us we kind of go through a few different mechanisms we actually kind of use an alternative bridging mechanism that goes through like a it's more of like a liquidity Bridge rather than like an actual token

Bridge um which you can get into a little bit later but um generally like I guess first it can be important to establish some context as to how chain obstruction is typically composed um within like the larger stack so chain obstruction can ultimately be understood through like three core components that create at least what we consider to be like a full chain abstracted experience and each of these kind of constitute different levels of practical implementation that take different approaches so number one you have what we consider to be blockchain level chain abstraction um this includes things at least in our opinion and we kind of see this as being quite quite a uh a compatible idea which is like including things like a polygon's ag layer um or the super chain or a Veil Nexus right so things that are actually

infrastructurally and intrinsically connecting and unifying blockchains um beyond the surface level so this is actually like you know like I said architectural connection which you know shared security sometimes shared liquidity unified bridging stuff like that that's great and like if this is possible and if you can do this like people everybody has their own takes about like this approach to chain abstraction this approach to like unification and liquidity or sorry fragmentation reduction some people think it's centralized or whatever but I think that it's a interesting approach and like ideally you could imagine a world like chain abration starts at this point right so you have like a collective of interconnected blockchains right so this is like step one now below this you have what we call account level chain ofaction this is actually where we sit particles this is what particle enables with what we call Universal

accounts um which we can talk a little bit more about later as well but um account LEL chain obstruction is just simply bringing chain obstruction to user accounts which can result in kind of the univers universalization of balances so I have all my balances across all Chains It's kind of sitting in this one spot as a user all I know is that I just have these balances and I can use them wherever so the account level chain exraction is basically the unification of account State account balances and ultimately automat automatic like bridging and whatnot um for and user accounts um then you have below that application Level chain of Attraction which is more kind of like for developers this is more programmatic so giving developers the ability to actually make their application intrinsically chain agnostic which is actually a pretty cool part of chain

instruction that people don't cover as often which is like the implications this has for developers is that they can now create applications that are not b found any single blockchain and using application Level chain abstraction solutions they can orchestrate and kind of create really seamless like and quite complex cross-chain you know transaction workflows sometimes this is based on intents that's usually the most common you have things like socket um I think socket is doing a lot of really cool things with their um like mofa protocol and um this kind of creating almost like an intent based system for applications and developers to kind of compose across any up they're doing some cool stuff you have a gorks orchestration API which kind of like programmatically and like U like primarily JavaScript kind of familiar languages allows developers to orchestrate very seamless cross chain transactions and workflows um even do

things like asynchronous timing and all those kind of more complicated TR you know uh developer facing things and maybe a little bit too granular for this rundown but um so like there's a lot of really cool things in there are usually intent based account level chain obstruction um is sometimes intent based there are some solutions that kind of take that approach we also have things like near which is more of like a sign signature aggregation idea which is they don't use intense directly but rather they more so allow like a single near account or contract to um kind of like own or sign transactions for accounts and other chains um you have things like particle which we're more focused on like an account abstraction model um where we kind of use like you know like one signature to then like authenticate a sequence of transactions we use like

kind of like a pseudo intent model it's not as uh like intent Centric as you might find other solutions to be like more application Level Solutions but use kind of like a similar idea um then you have some other kind of more native intent Focus models then at the blockchain level of course this is very different so that's where you have things like ACC super chain Etc Nexus which are are more of kind of like you know unification models um you know chain cooperatives or chain collectives however you want to say it um so this is like at least on a practical level how you can see chain struction being implemented from these Ser different levels all very different types of implementations but um definitely uh they're all equally contributing in my opinion to kind of the acquisition of like this complete idea another cool one

is lumio which isn't really like in this like like part of connecting uh chain AB in in this chain abstraction world but they've got a solution where they're able to deploy a VM onto a new settlement Network and so you can take a Solana application and have it continuous you know stay on Solana but also deployed onto the super chain and so I T I think this is kind of like another angle to take this progression where we're moving in into a world where it's going to be basically applications and then those applications might touch multiple different rollups as or or l1s as settlement networks and then we'll

have different you know orchestration protocols train abstraction protocols that help with the backend infrastructure of these applications because you know once they start touching multiple different rollups and settlement networks becomes extra complicated to try to move liquidity around and so on and so forth and all of that will happen behind the scenes so the these applications on the front end are going to be what the user feels and gets to know and have have familiarity with um but then all of these chain abstraction infrastructures are going to are going to help with the movements and the transactions underneath the hood and so you mentioned a few different a few different levels of the stack there I just want to reiterate right and this is uh the blockchain level uh which is kind

of like the smart contracts maybe on different Networks you have the account level which is like Universal accounts like just a single balance where I can have you know all my assets might be on different accounts but when I look at my wallet I see that everything is on my one wallet aggregated together um and then we've got like the intent solver layer right where you know I interact with a blockchain and then there's a solver or a filler that that fills the liquidity of my order and then the last the last piece is escaping me right now could you remind me what that what that fourth piece is yeah kind of the application Level with orchestration and with um that's where I would probably

put intents kind of like under the umbrella of the application Level so that's where you have I would primarily say like you know orchestration which I think sometimes can kind of be considered like very adjacent to intents as well um as well as like just intent protocols themselves this is where of course you kind of get this programmatic interaction and programmatic facilitation of kind of cross chain workflows and chain abstraction awesome and so when when you guys were delving into this this definitional piece of chain abstraction did you keep it relatively broad or did you dive into each one of these these layers um and then kind of like what were your findings after doing the research for this piece yeah so you we've had the opportunity to welcome aboard on our journey into the singularity this is the

endgame road map for fra and fraxel the new L2 out of the fra ecosystem that is totally based on fractal scaling fractal is a modular L2 blockchain built by fra with modular and fractal scaling in mind fractal scaling is based on the mandal BR set of fractal images and it explains how l2s become l3s and the entire app chain life cycle goes through its Evolution the frax ecosystem is made of some of the top builders in the space and has stemmed from its OG days of the frax stable coin it is now in the LST

space the LRT space and this frax L2 joins the existing Suite of fra products including fra Swap and frax lend you can see frax faery the bridge to go from any chain arbitrum optimism or main net into the fra main net Bridge your tokens and bring your FRA Max assets into the fractal ecosystem join today to get the best out of fraxel you are still early join today take part in our Expedition into the singularity like dive pretty deep into like the entire stack and communicate with pretty much every major

player in the stack um which has been great because we've kind of been able to understand actually like I think people typically overestimate like how big the champ vertical is it's actually pretty small there's not that many people building dead like specifically forchain obstruction um you know like the the main names like come the top of my head it's like you know polygon Avail particle socket near um you have like light protocol a few other guys that are kind of doing similar things um a goric of course and so like it's it's a pretty small um small subgroup but you know when we kind of did our research and actually like this whole like account blockchain application um we proposed this framework kind of created this framewor work with agoric so we kind of sat down with agoric and we said okay

well we know aor is like an application Level transction solution we know that we're doing like kind of more account stuff so how do we like articulate This and like make it clear that chain abstraction is more of a kind of collaborative vertical than a competitive one it's like all my talks have been very centered around this um idea that like CH fraction is not like a monopolistic thing to be achieved by one protocol I think you know early on there's a lot of ideas like a lot of people thought this and like I mean you know for good reasons I mean it makes sense it's like who's going to be the one protocol to do chain abstraction to like achieve chain abstraction like who's who's going to win the chain abstraction race but in our opinion this idea of winning some sort of chain

abstraction race is actually flawed because chain abstraction is a very ambitious goal and that's like I mean just purely the idea of like removing users from the notion of having to understand or use any chains specifically is there's a lot that goes into that um and trying and anybody that claims that okay we're going to do we're going to do this we're going to be the one that does chain of traction nobody else needs to there's no other solutions that need to be you know complimentary to this um I think is is usually uh just not a very sustainable way to look at it and it's it's typically um a less it's a lower quality way to actually achieve the problem so typically what is a better you know acquisition of this full transction idea is a collaborative approach where you have this type of

Stack this is why we actually created this idea of the stack in the first place with the gor which is because we realize that I think it was actually I was in I was in Dubai and I had this conversation with the gor and that's when we were kind of talking through these ideas and I was like yeah like we need to articulate this and that there's there's a multitude of solutions that need to work together to achieve chain obstruction because one protocol itself uh I think a lot of times you achieve it like you arrive at the same centralization problem if you just have like one single chain obstruction protocol that just kind of does everything um so that's why we kind of you know approach it with this idea of a stack where you have these different solutions and we've talked to all these

these different players we think that there is aot lot of different ways of doing it and I see I see like this idea of collaboration not competition but there definitely is competition still I'm not going to like you know say here and say like oh we're all like you know whatever holding hands and Building Solutions I think that there's there definitely still competition but horizontally so what I mean by that is that you have the stack right and it's a vertical stack so you have application blockchain account and there's no competition vertically because these are complimentary Solutions these are compatible Solutions right if you want an account level solution you want an application Level solution these typically work very well together sometimes some products will do both account application you know that kind of is a different scenario but generally there's no competition vertically the

competition that you have within chain abstraction is horizontally So within each layer itself so within between account level chain abstraction Solutions it's you know what are going to be the most adopted account level transtion Solutions what are going to be the most adopted application Level transaction Solutions what are developers going to want to use right I mean these are things that are unavoidable um and from our research we've seen a lot of different approaches to do this in different Stacks so you know like I mentioned with application you have intents you have kind of more general orchestration which I think are both a very interesting mechanism to of doing it um you even have like lower level Primitives like you know kind of the uh facilitation of of um cross Shain bridging which I would consider to not be like complete chain obstruction but more of like a component of it um and

then at the account level like I said you also have mul multiple approaches signature aggregation account abstraction intense stuff like this at the blockchain level also various different ways of doing it with ag you have like you know like a a ZK proof aggregation all this kind of stuff so there's a lot of different approaches to it um I think that you know through all the research that we've done we found it to be quite um I mean it's quite Cutting Edge to be honest like all the solutions being built in train obstruction are like you know at the the Forefront of like General Innovation web three and I think that's why train obstruction like people have known for a long time that this is a problem that needs to be solved but hasn't really materialized until now because the technologies have kind of progressed to a point where it

makes it possible so it's quite interesting dynamic between all other projects and I think that ideally what we see as a a modular implementation so I say this on Twitter as say chain of truction is modular because I believe I believe that like transction and it's you know like um materialization will be a modular stack of solutions you can kind of I want to use a different account level solution use different application Level solution whatever and that's how it works as a developer that's how it works as a user um I think this will be kind of the the way that it goes but who knows I think it's it's quite interesting and very quickly evolving Dynamic yeah that's what I was thinking as well um the stack sounds familiar uh from a modu perspective it's also interesting to think about the collaborative efforts from a vertical

perspective right you can have different parts within each like think was like a hamburger you got like your buns and your lettuce and tomatoes and then your your burger um and so you know we you kind of have these different parts but you know you can you can try a different Angus beef you can try a different you can use sesame seeds or you don't need them right and so like but like like the Angus beef isn't competing with the Tomato you know what I'm saying it's two different it's very important parts so like kind of stepping out of this analogy and back into like technical imp implementations without you cracking up too hard here like how does this collaboration like actually work like like how does My AG layer interact with particle also interacting with like an

across or like a intent based design like like is there like a technical lift that you have to go like work with these teams on it's like an app bya kind of cadence and then like how does it feel for me or what is like the ideal like end goal for like me to feel as a result of using multiple parts of this of this modular sandwich yeah I think we're definitely you know continuing to cook that that modular meal through the conversation here um yeah I think that you know it's a good point um and it's a good analogy too like you know there is definitely um like I think vertically the implementation is going to because I think if you only have like for example an application Level solution which is like you only have like an intense

system that exists at the application Level or you only have orchestration this is definitely still better than the current user experience and you know it's a good way to um like improve ux and make it easier for users to like you know leverage applications that have seamless Crossing workflows and all that stuff but the issue is that you still have a lot of unsolved problems so for example if you only have application Level then users don't have like the fragmentation problem across applications and chains still exists because while like you might have aggregated balances or like some degree of like you know really high quality intent systems or whatever in one application soon as you move to another chain another application it's using a totally different system it's using a different um you know kind of like implementation of chain abstraction or whatever if if it uses any at all and

then you're back at the same issue of like okay well now there's fragmentation again right which is fine if you have single applications that have good ux but the idea is that there's a compatibility here where you have account level Solutions which account level Solutions exist purely to solve that which is like create some mechanism for which users that can leverage their accounts across every application have some degree of like standard there of okay I can use my aggregated balance I can use my unified balances across every app and then each application handles the continuation of that the actual achievement of like full chain abstraction from the like perspective of you know cross chain workflows and you know for example I sign a transaction and it does uh you know 10 different things for me it puts like limit orders

or whatever maybe like you know classical intent Solutions and and um you know use cases like this is great I think this this helps a lot especially when it's done across chains um but you need the account level to have some of of basis there for users to leverage their balances across chains users to have one one address and stuff like that um so I think like these are really the two most intrinsically compatible Solutions if you have one without the other then you you miss a lot if you have only account level then you miss a lot of the granularity and the the usefulness of application Level um because of course the value from that comes from the fact that applications can really tailor that to enhance your experience and become intrinsically train agnostic um so this is where you know these two parts of the stock really

fit well together and then for the blockchain level I think that this is I see this as usually being more of of an optional layer it doesn't it's not required but it's definitely quite helpful especially when it comes to a lot of the problems that even I think like you know account level Solutions and maybe um application Level Solutions will struggle with to some degree to start is that even like if you have good intent systems or like you know good mechanisms of moving liquidity a lot of time you still run into the issues of like sometimes security isn't that great sometimes it's kind of slow because ultimately you're still dealing with like non-equivalent blockchains and to move funds across these blockchains trying to communicate in a way that's equivalent so this is really hard to do when there's no like unification of architecture across These Chains when

they're all using very different things and very different implementations of of uh kind of the stack and stuff like this then you result in either security assumptions trust assumptions or you're uh trading this off for um you know speed and cost and whatever it may be so this is a big problem right so I think this is where blockchain level chain abstraction comes in or um the AG or whatever you want to call it which is where if you can apply account level chain abstraction and application Level chain abstraction to a collective of chains that are unified architecturally to leverage shared security or shared bridging or whatever to where you can achieve the same stack of like you know atomically moving balances across chains and doing like really quick crossing workflows under way that actually has no major security assumptions and as quick

and as cheap this is possible primarily when you implement blockchain level chain abstraction without it then you still suffer from the issue of like you know how do you navigate this lack of equivalency across chains without imposing too many risks or or still not improving ux because it's too slow or whatever it may be right so like this is this is I think where a lot of the interesting collaboration comes in where like ideally in a future you have like at least from my perspective and of course people would disagree with the need for blockchain level chain attraction or the need for account level chain attraction whatever but I think from my perspective typically the way that that I see it as well as how particle sees it is that you'll have this future where you're going to have essentially um you know a blockchain I let's say it's like there's

something you have like a unified rollups for example um and these rollups are all kind of like they share some degree of um like security implementation or their equivalent in some way that um you know allows for kind of the attributes that I mentioned a moment ago then below this you have account level chain obstruction which operates across this entire Collective then you have application Level chain which operates with the applications across each application specific rollup and now you have the ability to number one orchestrate really complex cross chain transaction workflows through the means of intens whatever else you may want to use um in a way it's very cheap it's very you know secure you have accounts that can now seamlessly move balances across chains to create this Universal balance also in the same way without imposing you know trust

assumptions or or like security risks or um do some a way that that costs a lot or is is um you know slow and like this is this is I think the ultimate user experience there's always going to be some degree of like friction that's associated with it especially when you're you're moving across these these isolated chains but I think chain dire will reduce the majority of it it's even better if we can Implement block L CH protraction and have this like complete stack of solutions so this is how we see it this is why we kind of chose these different layers yeah I uh I really like this analogy of uh like built like this modular sandwich um I think that was very like that was a very good General overview of how these sections will fit together um and I do I do realize that

there's also this level of like I've heard people refer to it as like Co-op petition you've got to cooperate but you also compete and so it it sounds like you know we're cooperating vertically because the application has to work with the solver has to work with the account has to work with the blockchain so all these layers have to work together and then horizontally we have comp competing projects that are competing to be like the solver layer or the account project that takes on chain abstraction and so I I just want to double down because I really like the analogy that Andy gave with like kind of picking like each each like if you were to kind of pick a project from each layer you know let's say we we take

particle at the account layer and then pick your three you know other favorite projects at each you know one for each part of the stack could you kind of allude to like how you could work how particle specifically could work with you know an Ever Clear or an across or you know whatever the project is at each part of the stack to just kind of illustrate how the you know particle could work with and how these other projects could all integrate and and comprehensively uh build this experience yeah definitely um so I think we actually and it's good that you brought this up I'm glad you did because there's there's an article that we published with a gork and Avail um just last week and it it kind of goes into this exactly

which is what what we would consider to be one of the like a pretty good example of a complete stack which is aor orchestration API particles Universal accounts and Avail and access and this this is where this actually occupies each part of the stack so you have a Avil NEX for blockchain level particles Universal accounts for account level NE Works orchestration API for application Level and So within this article that we produced we went through a lot of different examples for how this would actually materialize it's like what does this actually look like on a ux level to use a solution that leverages all three do we need a solver layer is that built in is there just because I realized that's another layer of this stack but if if we have three does that also cover the solver layer or how do we how do we

incorporate that from my perspective it generally depends on the specifics like I I would still kind of confine it to those three okay um layers but I would consider for example a solver layer um or like a clearing layer for example to be more so a component of solutions within those three layers so for example if I have an intense system on the application Level this would then use a solver layer something like that nature um so rather it being a full chra solution of itself it's rather a it's a piece of infrastructure that then exists within uh some sort of application or account level solution um now for example at particle with universal accounts we do use a sort of

we call it a liquidity provider system but it can sort of be understood as like a filler system almost like an incens system we don't consider it to be like a full intense system but um it's it's adjacent in how it functions so we're of course in conversations with every clear in terms of you know maybe using your clearing layer to some degree to manage like uh how we uh kind of you know rebalance and manage our fil and St like that for the means of what we call Universal liquidity um and of course I think that there's a lot of good collaboration across like the stack of sers and intents and account level Solutions and application Level Solutions but there's a lot of solutions that don't use intense at all and I think a big Mis misconception around transtion is that it's actually like a

subvertical of intense like actually it is all intense and I don't necessarily agree with this I think that while a particle we we do use and kind of implement like architecture adjacent to intense um I think that you have plenty of solutions that aren't intense Centric that are still I would consider to be sh Solutions like N is a great example of this um they're implementing this kind of chain signature idea which is not like an intent based system necessarily they use NPC nodes to like sign transactions for accounts across mul chains owned by near contracts and near accounts like this which I I want to say like intrinsically is dependent upon like a solver system or something like this so it's definitely not like a 100% required component to achieve what you could consider chain abstraction but still I think that um it definitely fits

within like I would say most projects are proba probably like they impl Intense or something adjacent to intense like like you know many many uh like like we do and many others in the application Level space do um which that's that at that point within those Solutions that's where you see things like solver layers or of course like the recently introduced concept of like a clearing layer um actually start to take place um because those are solutions that that need it but it's not Unity necessarily I guess that's kind of the point I'm trying to make got it that makes sense um yeah it seems like those two layers that that that you touched on uh more importantly the the application and the account layer kind of bring the bring the majority of of I mean if if we can just get to those two from where we

are now then basically what you're getting at is like the difference from going from those two to the full three uh you know it would it would be an improvement but a marginal one compared to if we if we went from where we are today to uh having both account and application Level which seems to make sense to me now when it comes to specifically on the account level for Universal accounts this something that you guys are talking about quite a bit um still trying to wrap my head around it as well um we've heard smart accounts as well Universal accounts like what is this idea of like just like like account abstraction and chain abstraction it's different but similar like maybe you can

walk us through like this like this landscape of like how like smart account wallets or account abstracted wallets also play A Part into chain abstraction and kind of particles Universal account setup sure yeah definitely um so you know we for some context um we focused really heavily on chain obstruction over the past like you know year year and a half um to the point where we became like one of the largest account abstraction infrastructure providers in terms of like user operations through our bundler and pay Master infrastructure and all our sdks around youting canstruction through different through different angles um so when we wanted to tuckle chain obstruction um you know we kind of came from the angle of account abstraction and now what's best to understand about account obstruction is of course like you know

very simply it's the transition from externally owned accounts which is kind of the traditional rigid account structure to of course smart contract wallets which are much more flexible they're intrinsically programmable you can do a lot of really cool things with this gases transactions you know popup with transactions whatever may be and so there's I mean there's a lot of undeniable benefits to account abstraction and we really like the ERC 437 standard in terms of achieving account abstraction um the issue though is that account abstraction is uh actually quite difficult to apply across the board uh for example in like a chain scenario because a can abstraction has this issue of being smart contracts you're deploying smart contracts as accounts smart contracts are fragmented across chains they're isolated so if I have contract a on chain a contract B on

train B contract C on train C and I want to update something about this the smart contract and and push some sort of change to it like a state change for example then I do this on chain a and all a sudden now the contract on chain a is different from the contract on chain B and C so a constuction actually for a long time has been not very compatible with chain obstruction in terms of like its fundamental overlap because you have this major issue of fragmentation across chains where they're like as soon as you change something about a smart like the actual contract of a smart account um and at St so like say you change a signer right or you change a module or something like this on chain a then it's immediately different from all the other deployments that it has and also you

need to like deploy chain manage deployments and I mean it's just it's not that easy to work with it actually introdu some some complexity buttion has a lot of really great benefits that can work really well with like a chain abstraction because with the account abstraction you have for example you know you you can uh like delegate signing permissions so you can delegate signing authority to some third party where like you can have them sign transactions for you or do some other like pretty cool things they can lend pretty well to chain attraction gasless transactions just improve ux overall um and the programmability makes it easy to kind of create more specific account based solutions for chain of Attraction so what we want to tackle is well how do we leverage the pretty undeniable benefits of account exraction today but in a chain instuction scenario so how do

we actually leverage this for chain instraction so what we did was we introduced Universal accounts which are our answer to chain obstruction leveraging what we believe to be an inherently Superior way of managing accounts which is account obstruction but doing so in a totally new way that allows for it to actually benefit and enable chain abstraction um better than what we would believe to be possible with with EAS vers example so with universal accounts essentially what you can do is from to start with a very high level you can have one balanced you can use across all chains so this is the very simple kind of run-of the middle of it this is account level chain obstruction this what we're doing you have your Universal account you deposit funds 100 in arbitrum you you can use 100 usct wherever you want if I deposit 50 usct on arbitr based on ethereum then

I have 150 usct that I can use wherever right so like this is there there's no distinction really or there's no need for users to to manage and individually you know Bridge funds or stuff like this they have a universal balance this is really the idea of universal account um and furthermore they have one address spans across all chains and this is actually fundamentally using a smart account so you can basically we have we support a number of smart accounts uh like iconomy for example simple accounts if I this I will upgrade to being Universal accounts eventually that are made through SDK and this allows you to instantly use your balances across all chains um kind of have instant access and of course we leverage the benefits of of account of exraction do quite quite uh intrinsically especially for example like bundled user operations or

bundled transactions which actually allows us to take multiple operations so if we want to do a swap and a transfer and X and Y and Z begin with account obstruction makes it very easy and very sustainable to actually do all of this with only one transaction with only one Ledger entry so we can do like four or five operations and these can all be like sequential and actually like atomically insured through the means of actually having this all settle through through one- on-chain transaction um so there's a lot of like this is just one part of it you have a lot of other benefits that can actually really increase efficiency reduce time make it far more practical to implement chain obstruction and so Universal accounts are basically taking the benefits of account abstraction solving all the friction associated with it and applying

it universally by introducing this idea of universal liquidity which is just the same thing as having one balance across all chains and you can also with universal accounts using a similar mechanism pay for gas feeds in any token so I want to do a transaction I want to pay for gas feeds using my you know I don't know eth from base and I can do so it doesn't really matter I can use any token any um any transaction and that's about it now to get back to the original issue of like for smart accounts having this lack of parity across chains with the account state so if I want to upgrade a module assigner Etc something that changes the the the smart account um then you have this fragmentation all of a sudden we're also solving this so like this is one of the main things that

we wanted to solve with with universal accounts Beyond just kind of like the unification of balances and stuff like that um so we have actually our own Cosmos chain that we're deploying and this Cosmos chain is very much a background component it's not something that that developers build on it's not something that users leverage Cosmos chain is purely a backend component it's very much a necessity just for us to have a decentralized mechanism of coordinating Crossing transactions with universal accounts so what we can do is um for example with like this idea of fragmentation cross chains with with smart accounts is that with because we have this Cosmos chain that exists as kind of like this Central coordination layer we can actually have and manage like account state so if I change the

signer of my smart account on chain a then what we can do is actually on our Cosmos chain we can we can like uh monitor this and see okay well the state has changed on this chain and then we can immediately relay updates to every other chain that the account has to played on and maintain State parity this is really important because this means that there's no longer the issue of fragmentation of um actual like smart account State across chains because now I just basically deploy my account and I know that basically in the background the chain is maintaining this across every other chain um like specifically the particle Cosmos chain um and this is allowing us to therefore solve the issue of some account fragmentation so Universal accounts like I I've just kind

to talk for a few minutes but basically number one um allows you to have one balance across all chains one address across all chains use any gas token for transactions through the same mechanism and of course it solves the issue with account abstraction which is the fragmentation of of account State through the means of what we call our master key store Hub which is if you guys are interested valal has some good pieces on like the idea of a key store rollup so we take a somewhat similar approach to it um in terms of a kind of like unifying and like having a storage layer almost for smart accounts do you see the end goal of particle being this Universal liquidity layer is that something that's kind of like on the road map further down down the line or are you going to kind of like can are

you going to just sort of like manage the liquidity across these different chains and Bridge behind the scenes when users instruct particle to do so you could think of it as kind of like a mix of both to some degree so our Universal Equity mechanism basically uses a collection of uh essentially like the way that I I kind of convey it is just fillers basically so um it's just you know entities that can you know move liquidity from one chain to another by having basically pools of intermediary tokens so the way works at a very high level is that as a user I want to you know do a transaction for one eth on base and I have one e on arbitrum so what I do is I will click confirm and like you know wait 10 20 seconds and in

this 20 10 20 seconds what's happening is that first of course to the means of like bundle transactions with you know account with account exraction is that we first swap that e to an intermediary token so an intermediary token in this case means usct USC so now we swap that to USC for example we send this USC to a filler that then says okay well you know I now received 100 UCC and this is going to be released on base right so it's from Mar ter it's going to be released on base releases the equivalent amount of Base through a pool that's maintained across both chains um it can be kind of like a there's you know a future where this is like a bunch of decentralized operators that each maintain pools each chain and can work with one another it's

kind of like the end goal but um the funds are released on the other chain swapped back to the Token that they want to use eth for example all again in one transaction and then sent to their sent to their balance so it's actually like basically two transactions one to send it to the destination chain then from the destination chain one to send it back to the user um so it's pretty interesting um it's a very simple way of doing it in terms of us being the universal liquidity layer we don't really consider like particle to be the like provisioner and like the main entity that's like handling all liquidity um we will like a big part of like our Universal liquidity mechanism will definitely facilitate a lot of like liquidity management um through Universal accounts uh but this is again like with all of our infrastructure very

decentralized and open for anybody to kind of like contribute and ideally in the future like run a pool and kind of stuff like this um so we can kind of be thought of like that to some degree but we're also very much uh like you know open to the compatibility with other Bridges like liquidity sources and stuff like that um so this is definitely not out of the cards either this is kind of like how we look at it from the the liquidity standpoint um and how we position our yeah and I wanted to talk a little bit about the incentive structure you guys are going to set up as well we just have a couple minutes left so maybe we can just briefly touch on that any closing thoughts as to how you see like particle network using its own Cosmos chain to kind of decentralize uh you know what a

potential particle token would be used for in a chain abstraction and account abstraction kind of network setup um yeah and just generally any closing thoughts yeah definitely I'm happy to just kind of quickly touch on on the actual like incentives and the network structure and stuff like that um so for example our Cosmos chain um you know whenever you do a transaction um and for example you pay for universal gas or you do some sort of universal quity mechanism it actually settles and is verified in our chain using our token so our token kind of acts as like the primary um sort of like value model and set of mechanism for the chain it Powers rep all the validators so validators they they are they receive delegation

our native token token every transaction is settled in the native token um so it's sort of like a like a value coru mechanism now this of course allows like you know uh just some degree of a value acral for the particle chain itself through the means of the token um of course like the more transactions the more the token is used so the more the token is consumed um of course without users knowing so users don't need to really hold their token to actually do anything with universal accounts it's purely on the background so all transactions are they end up being settled in the token which means the token is consumed to the same degree that Universal accounts are used um plus of course used for validators and uh we well you know we we can touch on this just very briefly but we also use like a

dual staking mechanism because our chain like I said is very much like a background component that needs to be very resilient and secure so um we kind of use two sub of validators want is secured by our token um and so like there's a lot of like ways that our token kind of fits into the picture here in terms of like operating as incentives for securing the chain um transactions being settled in this of course it's a transaction fee for the chain and all this kind of stuff um so it's quite an important kind of like base instruction component and of course it gets a lot of usage just through the means of universal accounts sping leverage in general um so this is kind of like how we position our token um so yeah quite interesting the cosm chain again like we generally position this as like

basically just being sort of like the the coordination layer of sorts the point of um like uh of course managing the actual account State managing and like kind of facilitating cross chain transaction execution stuff like this of course acting also as a point of security um versus like the alternative like without a cosmos chain in this example without like some point of like sort of like like a large um you know decentralized infrastructure um would result in like you know I mean you could do similar things on a server for example but we don't see this as being a sustainable solution in J instruction so we see as chain of struction really being a decentralized construct something that especially on the account level requires decentralized coordination not some sort of offchain entity doing everything and um like

facilitating transactions and solving and filling and stuff like that it needs to be um like kind of you know credible onchain actors that are are easy to to kind of track and incentivize and stuff like this this is really how we're trying to position our chain as being a point to centralization for Universal accounts which ultimately are the ability to leverage the kind of tagline that we we've been kind of thinking about is basically one balance one address across any chain this is kind of the essence of of universal accounts um so yeah that's that's a quick rund down from from the chain side and kind of how that fits into the picture fantastic man I I really appreciate you coming on and sharing insights with us today it's been a pleasure and I think all of us are pretty excited for a future of

interacting on chain uh where chain abstraction is a is real I mean not that it's not real but I I I keep asking you privately when and I I know that everyone's working on it very diligently so quite excited to see a lot of this come out and yeah thanks thanks for coming on man yep thanks again for having me um I was very glad to to pop on these podcasts always amazing sessions and yeah we're also very very excited about chain instuction I think it's like going to be hopefully one of the most impactful Technologies um to user experience and should hopefully Drive quite a lot of value equ gral for Developers for users of course change the entire incentive mechanism for developers and for end users significantly improve the user experience um so yeah really excited about it of course if you know anybody

watching the podcast is interested to learning more um we do a lot of content at blog. particle. Network you can also um check out other prodal like socket loric um you know people like this near uh Ever Clear also amazing prodject that are building in the space check out Frontier research they do a lot of really good stuff around chain obstruction as well um yeah thanks again for having me guys