Chain Abstraction: Empowering Multi-Chain Development

As the blockchain ecosystem continues to expand, developers face increasing challenges in creating applications that can seamlessly operate across multiple chains. The current landscape often requires intricate knowledge of each blockchain's specific protocols, APIs, and idiosyncrasies. This complexity not only slows down development when it comes to integrating new tokens in any given application, but also limits the adoption of these technologies by creating silos between networks and preventing a seamless UX for users.

Chain abstraction emerges as a pivotal solution to this problem, offering developers the tools to build truly chain-agnostic applications.

The Developer's Dilemma

Today's blockchain developers often find themselves in a challenging position:

1. Multiple Codebases: Maintaining separate codebases for each blockchain they want to support.

2. Diverse APIs: Learning and implementing different APIs for each chain.

3. Complex Infrastructure: Managing intricate infrastructure, or multiple providers, to interact with various networks.

4. (As a result) Fragmented User Base: Limiting their application's reach by choosing specific blockchain ecosystem.

These challenges not only increase development time and costs but also create barriers to innovation and adoption.

Chain Abstraction: A Developer-Centric Approach

Chain abstraction aims to enhance and streamline the user experience by making blockchain concepts nearly invisible. From a technical standpoint, it provides developers with a unified interface to interact with multiple blockchains. The goal is to abstract away the complexities of individual chains, allowing developers to focus on building innovative applications rather than grappling with blockchain-specific intricacies.

It's important to first acknowledge that there's no absolute definition of chain abstraction. The perception of what chain abstraction actually is depends on the audience—be it developers or users. This article primarily focuses on the developer's perspective of chain abstraction.

Key Components for Developers:

Before delving into solutions, let’s review what components a developer usually have to deal with before being able to “list” a blockchain in their application.

1. Key generation: Wallet as a Service or Embedded Wallet

Before even considering dealing with blockchain data and transaction developers face the challenge of generating wallet addresses and signatures. This is where the magic of cryptography takes place. Eliptic curves as well as the method used to perform these operations varies from one chain to another.

Since a few year we’ve seen emerged many WaaS on the market offering: - A single sign-on solution for multiple blockchains. - Automated account creation and management on different chains. - Simplified key management and recovery processes. - Sign message and operations across different networks - To some extent these solutions can even be “decentralized”, or at least composed of several actors.

Projects such as Coinbase Embedded Wallets, Blockdaemon’s Builder Vault, or DFNS are tackling this challenge.

As mentioned in our previous article, the frontier between WaaS and application built on top of WaaS are sometimes blurry and definitely hard to grasp for the end user looking for a complete end to end experience. This is the first block of the chain abstraction initiative. Offering an easy way for developers to not care about cryptography, address generation, signature, mnemonic, seed-phrases. All these concepts that aren’t familiar to non crypto native users.

2. Unified API to read blockchain data, and post transaction on-chain.

At the core of chain abstraction is a unified API that provides a single point of access to multiple blockchains. These APIs should allow developers to:

• Query data from multiple chains using a standardized format.

• Real-time indexing and synchronization across chains.

• Efficient caching and data management strategies.

• Execute different transactions types (transfer, staking, mint nft) across different networks without having to adapt their code.

• Access blockchain-specific features through a common interface.

Projects like Covalent or Moralis are good examples of solutions trying to abstract the “read” aspect.

They provide relevant and accurate data through a somehow unified model.

At Adamik, we aim to not only address the “read” part, but also the “write” subject, making it easier for companies to use a single toolbox for all their blockchain interactions.

3. Cross-Chain SDKs
   
   The previous unified API is still limited to executing transaction within a single network. As the world become multichain, developer-friendly SDKs powering cross-chain interactions will become crucial. These SDKs should provide:

   • Built-in support for cross-chain asset transfers and swaps.

   • Automated handling of gas fees and network selection.

   
   Projects like Skip's cross-chain API or expand.network are examples of such tools.
   
   

4. Chain-Agnostic Smart Contract Frameworks and deployment platform

Currently, deploying an Ethereum (EVM) smart contract on Solana VM requires too much effort. Once the barriers between chains are lifted, developers might want to deploy their contacts on as many chains as possible, as easily as possible.

Frameworks that allow developers to write smart contracts once and deploy them across multiple chains will become powerful tool. These should offer:

• A common language or abstraction layer for writing chain-agnostic contracts.

• Automated compilation and deployment tools for multiple targets.

• Built-in security features and best practices.

Implementing the Ideal Solution

To truly empower developers, an ideal chain abstraction solution would combine all these components into a cohesive development ecosystem. Here's what this might look like:

1. One-Stop Development Platform: A comprehensive platform that integrates the WaaS, unified API, cross-chain SDKs, and smart contract frameworks. Developers could write, test, and deploy multi-chain applications from a single environment.

2. Automated Chain Management: Built-in tools for chain selection, signer compability, gas fee management, and optimal management of infrastructure to ensure resilience and accuracy.

3. Unified Testing Framework: A testing suite that allows developers to simulate and test their applications across multiple chain environments simultaneously.

4. Cross-Chain Monitoring and Analytics: Integrated tools for monitoring application performance, user activity, and transaction flows across all supported chains.

Challenges and Considerations

While building such comprehensive tools for chain abstraction is ambitious, several challenges need to be addressed:

1. Balancing Abstraction and Control: Providing enough abstraction between chains for simplicity while still allowing fine-grained control when needed.

2. Simplicity and consistence: Ensuring that the abstraction layer doesn't introduce significant complexity to developers. Always avoid rushing to the solution until it is actually really unified.

3. Security: Maintaining the security guarantees of individual chains while operating across multiple networks.

4. Keeping Pace with Innovation: Continuously updating the abstraction layer to support new chains and features.

Conclusion

Chain abstraction represents a paradigm shift in blockchain development. By providing developers with the tools to easily build and deploy multi-chain applications, we can unlock the full potential of the blockchain ecosystem. This approach not only simplifies the development process but also ensures that applications can reach the widest possible audience, regardless of their preferred blockchain.

As the industry moves towards this vision, collaboration between different projects, standardization efforts, and continued innovation in developer tools will be crucial. The future of blockchain development lies not in mastering the intricacies of individual chains, but in creating applications that can seamlessly operate across the entire blockchain landscape.