Introducing Chain Abstraction
Onboard your users from anywhere.
Web3 deserves a better multichain UX.
The emergence of L2s (and soon L3s!) has made cheap, fast dApp interactions available to everyone in the space. However, it’s also created a wildly confusing experience for users that have to navigate bridging, gas, and infrastructure across chains.
To fix this, we’re introducing a powerful new design pattern and toolkit for applications that want to onboard users from anywhere: Chain Abstraction.
Multichain UX Sucks
Interacting with a dApp across chains today is difficult and time-consuming, even for seasoned crypto veterans.
Consider a relatively simple task, like supplying liquidity to a lending pool on another chain. To accomplish this, users must:
- Discover a pool they want to lend to in a money market dApp.
- Leave the dApp entirely so they can bridge funds to the chain the pool is on (and potentially swap into a bridgeable asset before they can do so).
- Figure out how to get gas on the target chain.
- Finally, navigate back to the original application to deposit funds into the pool.
This flow is simply not good enough for any application today that aims to onboard any but the most crypto-native users. It’s also a problem that’s getting worse: as more and more L2s are launched, the user experience gets ever more fragmented and frustrating.
At Connext, our mission is to make the multichain web3 world accessible to a global audience. We do this by building public goods that help you, the developer, empower users to focus on what matters most: your application.
Enter Chain Abstraction
Chain Abstraction, similar to Account Abstraction, is a pattern to improve dApp user experience by minimizing the need for users to care about the chain they’re on.
With Chain Abstraction, your dApp can execute logic from any chain. Users no longer need to switch networks, sign transactions on different chains, or spend gas on another chain. For the first time, users can seamlessly interact with your dApp from any supported chain, using any token, all without ever leaving your UI.
This pattern is applicable to just about any dApp user flow you can think of:
- Depositing funds into a pool or vault from anywhere.
- Participating in an LBP or airdrop from anywhere.
- Paying for infrastructure or middleware from anywhere.
- Purchasing an NFT or POAP from anywhere.
- Staking ETH in an LST protocol from anywhere.
A Toolkit to Chain Abstract any dApp
Building a fully Chain Abstracted world will take time and coordination between wallets, applications, data providers, and infrastructure. BUT there are meaningful steps any application can take today that massively improve user experience.
To help developers, Connext is releasing the Chain Abstraction Toolkit: a simple set of smart contract modules and pre-built UI components (coming soon!) to Chain Abstract your dapp without any need for contract changes or audits.
We want to make this pattern as easy as possible to support. With the Toolkit, developers can implement seamless, chain abstracted user flows in a matter of days (and eventually, hours).
How Does the Toolkit Work?
At the core of Connext is a single primitive, xcall, that allows a contract on one chain to interact with a contract on another, similar to solidity’s lower level CALL.
The Chain Abstraction Toolkit wraps xcall in simple logic to swap to/from the tokens you need using DEXs and aggregators local to a given chain, and interact with the target function you specify. This means all you need to do is:
- Write a simple adapter for the function you want to Chain Abstract.
- Deploy the modules to the chains you want to support.
- Call the above from your UI.
Why Connext?
There’s a few simple reasons why you should Chain Abstract your dApp using Connext.
- Security: Connext is secured by the battle-tested canonical bridges that already secure each chain, and not by 3rd party validators.
- Flexibility: The Toolkit works with every chain we support both now and in the future and with any asset by tapping into DEXs and aggregators on each chain.
- Efficiency & Composability: By integrating at the smart contract level, you retain composability and ensure your users get the best possible pricing for crosschain transactions (including positive slippage!).
Ready To Explore Chain Abstraction?
You can start today by:
- Checking out the Chain Abstraction landing page to learn more.
- Joining the Waitlist for the full Chain Abstraction Toolkit.
- Exploring the docs to build it from scratch yourself.
If you have any questions or run into any issues, get in touch!
About Connext
Connext is a network for fast, trustless communication between chains and rollups. It is the only interoperability system of its type that does this cheaply and quickly without introducing any new trust assumptions. Connext is aimed at developers looking to build secure bridges and other natively cross-chain applications. To date, over $1.5b in transactions have securely crossed the network.
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