A Seamless Multi-Chain Future
First seen at ETH Infra Day in Seoul on September 4th, 2023
On September 4th, 2023, the vibrant city of Seoul played host to the much-anticipated ETH Infra Day by Epic Web3. This event gave me the opportunity to explain how the paradigm is changing and how modular blockchains are shaping the future of decentralized technology.
Part I: Will a user know which chain they’re on?
These days there are tens of events sponsored by maybe hundreds of crypto projects. Many of these are blockchain projects. Some of these are L1s, others L2s, others may even already be L3s building on the OP Stack, ZK Stack, Orbit or Stark Stack, just to name a few.
What does all this mean?
It means that the paradigm is changing. During the 2017 ICO craze, up until the last bull run, we saw a proliferation of (mostly ERC-20) tokens representing whatever type of right in a crypto project, whether it be a DEX, a Money Market, a Social Platform or any other type. I would call this the Tokenomics Era. It means that everyone was trying to understand how to make crypto work as an economic model.
Some experiments were great, others went bad, others rug pulled, but I think that the single best learning we got from that period was that in order to use blockchain technology as a ledger for any type of value transfer and information recording, it is necessary to build high throughput systems.
Hence, the new period that boomed from 2020 on: the Scalability Era.
The ratio is simple: nobody wanted to experience the ultra-high gas fees that we got during the CryptoKitties craze in late 2017 when a single swap on a DEX could cost hundreds of dollars.
So some projects focused on scaling Ethereum. This is called vertical scalability, meaning that we try and abstract computation on a new layer, inheriting security at the same time. One of the pioneers in this was Optimism (OVM).
Instead, I ‘come’ from Avalanche, having worked on Avascan since before Avalanche mainnet even went live in September 2020. And Avalanche was one of the first to promote true horizontal scalability, meaning that computation is segmented for specific use cases or portions of the total consensus committee, and security is not inherited from the base layer, but only managed from it.
Now, blockchain development is becoming a commodity in the industry, much like token deployment was from 2017 to 2020.
Since it’s becoming so easy to spin up a new chain, there will likely be thousands of new chains in the next 3–5 years, each with a different value proposition, use case and reference market. But will the user know which chain they’re using when interacting with an application? Likely not, for a number of reasons:
- With account abstraction, more users will have a gasless experience so they don’t even need gas tokens to pay for fees
- With thousands of chains, chain selection on the wallet will likely be clunky — either we can connect to all chains at once, or chain selection will be abstracted away at wallet UX level
- With the rise of app-specific chains, or app-chains, there could potentially be a single chain highly optimised to power a single application, so frequent network switches will be needed, and this is not good UX
Just as an example: FarQuest, a game built on Ethereum on the Farcaster protocol, abstracts away the network specifics. There’s no indication that this game is on Ethereum, nor on OP Mainnet when it will likely migrate along with Farcaster in the next few weeks. Sure, you connect your wallet on Ethereum (that’s the wallet’s responsibility), but the app UX abstracts it away.
There’s no need for the end users to know which blockchain they’re using.
Part II: What’s happening on a blockchain vs.. everywhere
So the explorer that we’re used to using is getting obsolete, for a specific big reason: it just shows data from a single chain.
Or maybe it has a dropdown menu to switch from one chain to the other.
But as we’re seeing in user behaviour, and in new tools developed in recent years (see DeBank), the approach needs to be multi-chain first.
Users need a single interface to track assets and transactions across a variety of chains, and they can’t do that with a ‘normal’, single-chain block explorer.
They need a new type of explorer.
They need a Universal Block Explorer. But you know, how can you build a single website that tracks objects that have different behaviours? For example, an address on Bitcoin and on Ethereum are two very different things. Coins have very different behaviours, transactions are designed in a different way, and so on.
So right now we can’t think of a truly universal block explorer, but more of a unified one: that means that we can unify and aggregate data points coming from different blockchains that have the same structure in a single interface.
This is what a user wants right now, because it’s the most convenient interface they’re using on other tools as well.
And we at Avascan have been doing this for a while now: we built the world’s first truly multi-chain block explorer, unified at the Avalanche ecosystem level.
We call this type of explorer the Ecosystem Explorer, because Avalanche is an ecosystem.
We define an Ecosystem as a set of blockchains that use the same node, so that they participate in the same type of consensus.
So Avalanche is an Ecosystem because is governed by the same Avalanche/Snowman++ consensus and all validators need to run the avalanchego node, but it can also be the Superchain, or the HyperNetwork (what we call the zkSync network of ZK Stack HyperChains), or the Cosmos IBC Network.
On Avascan, on the home page you see transactions and blocks flowing from all the subnets, and you can feel the speed and the fast time-to-finality in the network.
Then if you go to the address page, you’ll be able to see all your tokens across all the chains in the specific ecosystem, and so on with every data point.
On Avascan, you can see everything that’s happening on Avalanche, from a single interface.
Part III: Announcements
Back in January, we started working on a spinoff for Avascan that would be fitting for any EVM blockchain, and we quickly started iterating on it to match the feature set of Avascan, and then from other leading explorers.
In May, we announced this as Avascan Standard Mode for any new and existing EVM subnet on Avalanche, but we realised that we could do a lot more with it.
We call this project Routescan, and it’s the base platform for a unified multi-chain block explorer. It uses the same indexing technology we use for Avascan, and improves on the experience we made over the last three years in making a block explorer.
It’s a big project that quickly caught the attention of some major blockchain developers, so we started working with some teams to understand what was missing, what we needed to change and so on. Over the last 6 months, we’ve been working tirelessly to understand how to best deliver such a product, and now we’re ready to show something.
So I’m excited to announce some new projects that we’re building on top of Routescan. They are all PoCs for now, because we don’t think they’re final, nor that they have all the feature set we think they need or the complete blockchain history. But it’s enough to give you an idea of what’s next for the block explorer.
The first one is the Superscan: it’s the Superchain explorer, and it features OP Mainnet and Base from the Superchain, and a few of other OP Stack chains. If you’re a user of the OP universe of chains, the Superscan is the explorer you’ll want to use.
Then there’s the Hyperscan: it just hosts a streaming of data from zkSync now, but if everything goes smoothly, we plan to include all the hyperchains here.
And then there’s the third one. We don’t have a specific naming for it, we just call it the Ethereum L2s Ecosystem Explorer. It’s a cauldron of all EVMs that we support in some way that are connected to Ethereum. It aims to represent everything that’s happening on Ethereum and around Ethereum.
For example, here is one of my favorite pages: the Cross Transactions List. It gives you an idea of what’s happening across chains interacting with each other.
Look at the Address Details also: see here, I took this screenshot completely randomly, and I caught an address that has gas tokens both on OP Mainnet, Base and zkSync. This is the simple validation of the thesis: end users jump from one chain to the other, so they need to see everything that they’re doing in a single place, just like they add all the networks on a single wallet.
We’re designing the block explorer for a future in which users don’t have to choose which chain they use, and developers don’t need to switch back and forth to debug cross-chain applications.
We’re designing a block explorer for a seamless multi-chain future.
