B.O.S, PLEASE!
In 2006, Rihanna released a song called “S.O.S”. The singer might as well have written that about trying to mint an NFT on a hyped L2 using her Meta Mask wallet.
S-O-S, please, someone help me
It’s not healthy for me to feel this
Y-O-U are making this hard
I can’t take it, see it don’t feel right
Anyone who has spent sufficient time in Web3 and ventured beyond one chain ecosystem will quickly run into the question of: How do I even get my assets from this chain to the other? Add to that the need to install yet another wallet app because the chains you chose simply aren’t supported by the extensions you already use, and so on.
Intern has five different wallets on Desktop alone. Most of them don’t even hold much value; they were created for specific actions, such as collecting art or figuring out what’s so special about a new token standard on a native chain.
Degens are bound to have even more since the yield tends to be highest in newer ecosystems that are still throwing out money in an attempt to capture attention.
All of this just goes to underline the broader point that is:
Web3 fragmentation
Web3 is fragmented. That isn’t new; it just seems to be getting worse. Ethereum and the EVM maintain their first-mover advantage with a flourishing dev ecosystem and a variety of tools facilitating development.
However, as each hyped product launch has illustrated, Ethereum mainnet was never going to scale to support millions of users. While a shift to PoS has addressed the energy consumption problem, the issue with high gas fees remained. The new Ethereum roadmap is optimized to enable scaling through Rollups.
And for some time, everyone was launching rollups. Now, L2Beat counts 36 different Layer-2s in different stages of development and even 3 L3s. Liquidity and users have followed and are now scattered across these rollups and beyond the EVM ecosystem across other native chains such as Cosmos, Solana, and NEAR.
The fragmentation itself isn’t the problem. The problem is what it means for current and prospective users.
As illustrated above, UX sucks when you’re moving across chains. People with funds on one L2 might be invested enough to go through with their swaps. But what about people who are still at the top of the funnel?
How do people even find dApps?
There are more than 200 blockchains and 9000 currencies in crypto. Even though there are aggregator sites like Coingecko, it remains hard for users to find a dApp that they’ll benefit from. So far, despite various attempts, we’re still missing a Web3 dApp store.
The next question once users have found a dApp they want to use is, often, if it’s even safe. Considering that 1.8 billion was lost to hackers in crypto in 2023, it is a valid question. While multiple hacks are attributed to social engineering, one phenomenon stood out: Front-end hacks.
Your dApp is only as decentralized as its least decentralized part
It’s a lesson many learned the hard way. Even though smart contracts are permissionless and on-chain, websites hosted on centralized web servers aren’t — making them a preferred attack vector.
To summarize, web3 is fragmented, leading to bad UX and terrible discovery, and its heavy reliance on web2 leads to a situation where it’s not living up to its promise of open access, censorship resistance, and decentralization.
The good news is: users don’t care about infrastructure.
If they did, they’d not celebrate it as much when big corporations run a majority of a chain’s validators.
In the end, what people care about most isn’t even earning points but having easy access to products they want or that provide value to them.
Web3 has the potential to provide services that empower users to own their data and be self-sovereign. But we’ll only get there if we abstract as much of the infrastructure away as possible.
And that’s what the B.O.S. will do.
B.O.S = the experience layer
The Blockchain Operating System will provide a unified layer that aggregates web3 experiences to offer users a one-stop-shop for all their web3 needs. It’s part of NEAR’s modular stack, which allows other ecosystems to benefit from NEAR’s unique architecture.
The entire stack consists of 4 layers, with BOS being the top layer, the one users see when interacting with any dApp built using BOS components.
When introduced, the BOS was highlighted as a way for dApps to deploy decentralized front-ends of their products. Nevertheless, BOS is more than just a decentralized front end. It also will serve as a discovery layer and as a layer that abstracts the complexity of a multichain world.
Chain/abstracc
In a nutshell, that’s what chain abstraction is all about, and the BOS is the visible layer that allows users to connect with any dApp on any chain. The broader vision of chain abstraction is removing all the complexities of web3 by abstracting them away and leaving developers to deal with the complexities in the backend.
With chain abstraction, users will have a single account that allows them to control accounts on other chains, including on Bitcoin. And the B.O.S. is the interface for it.
B.O.S in the front, the Open Web in the back.
While it’s unlikely that fragmentation will cease in favor of consolidation anytime soon, with NEAR’s unifying experience layer, developers and users will soon have a way to access apps across chains without thinking about it. The B.O.S. is one step closer to building an open web that is easily accessible and permissionless yet offers a friction-free experience.
Or, as Rihanna would put it:
Where have you been
All my life? All my life?
(Rihanna, Where Have You Been, 2011)
Written by @NEAR_intern
About NEARWEEK
NEARWEEK is the ultimate destination for all things related to NEAR. As the official NEAR Protocol newsletter and community platform, NEARWEEK goes beyond journalism in order to actively celebrate, participate in, and contribute to the NEAR ecosystem.
NEAR Newsletter | NEAR Social | Editorial (dApp) | Twitter
About NEAR
NEAR is on a mission to onboard a billion users to the limitless possibilities of Web3 with the Blockchain Operating System (B.O.S). Leveraging its high-performance, carbon-neutral protocol, which is swift, secure, and scalable, NEAR offers a common layer for browsing and discovering the Open Web.
