Near founder's latest article: How Near's chain abstraction brings a better Web3 experience?
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Near founder's latest article: How Near's chain abstraction brings a better Web3 experience?
NEAR attracts billions of users through DApps and eliminates Web3 fragmentation.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: ILLIA POLOSUKHIN
Compiled by: TechFlow
Most Dapps today aren't truly decentralized applications. If users have to leave the application just to start using it, then it’s not really an app—it’s just a frontend. If users must manually register accounts through exchanges, manage multiple wallets, gas fees, and bridges, are you really building an application? I don’t think so—and this may explain why only a few million people worldwide are actually using Dapps.
If we want Web3 to become mainstream—and if we believe that a more open, decentralized internet empowering individual sovereignty is better for the world—we need to do much better.
The dominant narrative in Web3 today is modularity: splitting blockchain functions into separate layers—settlement, data availability, and execution—for scalability. Layer-2 solutions, optimistic and ZK rollups, data availability layers, sidechains, and state channels are all examples of modular approaches.
However, the growing number of blockchains and rollups has degraded user and developer experiences. A modular, multi-chain world leads to greater fragmentation of liquidity, apps, and users, making UX overly complex. Developers also feel pressure toward specific tech stacks, limiting their app's potential audience. Today, when you build a Dapp on a single chain, you confine yourself to a niche market.
I propose a better vision—one that applies across Ethereum and all of Web3: let’s collectively advance mainstream adoption through chain abstraction. The idea is simple: blockchains must be decoupled from users so they no longer act as barriers to entry or participation. NEAR has focused on this vision since 2018 and has become the most user-accessible network in Web3, with 12.4 million monthly active users and 34 million total users.
Here’s how we can attract billions of users to Dapps and eliminate Web3 fragmentation.
What does this mean for users?
Imagine how using a Dapp should feel: seamless transactions across networks, browsing diverse experiences within a single interface. For example, Alice picks up her phone, unlocks it, and opens KAIKAI. She orders a smoothie from a local store, then notices a discount at Maison, her favorite clothing shop, and buys a pair of spring shoes. Alice realizes she’s earned enough KAICHING rewards to redeem a badge at Maison—but she doesn’t know it’s a Polygon NFT, nor does she care; it’s simply redeemed in her account.
Later that day, while browsing Maison within KAIKAI, she sees a new offer on her badge: exclusive tickets to an event hosted by her favorite DJ. She purchases the ticket using KAICHING and receives two passes—still unaware they’re Arbitrum NFTs. With an extra ticket, Alice invites her friend Bob and asks for his address.
Bob sends Alice his NEAR address and opens his app to view the ticket. He sends some ETH to thank Alice for the invite and checks his balance across different cryptocurrencies. While riding the subway with time to spare, he decides to buy BTC, using USDC as collateral, then mints a Fighting Dragon NFT on Magic Eden. His friend Charles had messaged earlier about playing together in a new game on NEAR where their dragons battle to earn stakable tokens.
All these interactions happen within a single interface, completely private. No wallets to manage, no network switching, no gas fees to handle—everything is embedded directly into the transaction and managed behind the scenes. Alice doesn’t need to know which chain the ticket lives on; Bob can send funds in any cryptocurrency he chooses, then instantly buy another crypto the next second. All within one app. This is the level of seamlessness our ecosystem should strive for.
How do we achieve chain abstraction?
Every developer building in Web3 would benefit from access to such a vast potential user base—the kind where anyone who uses an app can participate immediately. Today, developers choose chains based on access to liquidity or specific user groups on certain rollups. But in a chain-abstracted future, they can simply pick the best technology to build with. Users will come for the best experience.
Imagine how absurd it would be if Gmail users couldn’t send emails to Outlook addresses. The same applies to Web3 addresses. The core assumption of chain abstraction is this: end users don’t care about underlying blockchains. They just want the app to work. In reality, blockchains are merely infrastructure for extracting value from Web3—secure assets immune to seizure, economic opportunities, removal of intermediaries, global permissionless identity, provenance of data, entertainment experiences, and more.
The central goal of chain abstraction is to solve the growing fragmentation caused by modularity in Web3. While this is most evident at the user experience layer, fragmentation of liquidity and accounts has been enabled by innovations at the security layer.
Zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs introduce a fundamentally new approach to ledger security. Previously, trust relied on a decentralized set of validators. Now, even a single machine can prove whether rules were followed via simple cryptographic proofs. This means developers no longer have to build exclusively on shared chains or spend massive resources launching new ones—they can now rapidly deploy a chain on a single server.
This new paradigm enables cross-settlement: as more chains become fully provable via ZK, it becomes impossible to reverse a chain without reversing others if proofs are published across them. Transactions from one chain can be settled on multiple others via ZK proofs. This creates mesh security, as all proofs are continuously aggregated, enabling secure asset movement across chains.
To achieve unified security, two things are needed at the stack’s foundation: data availability—ensuring everyone can sync even if operators go offline—and decentralized sequencers for applications without centralized operators.
The next layer is unified identity and security. Users should have one address across all possible chains and move assets freely between them. From the user’s perspective, this should feel like a single account—interacting with apps across chains, with assets automatically bridged or swapped.
I call this “account aggregation” and will share more details in a forthcoming article. NEAR will launch the next version of FastAuth in March 2024, featuring the ability to map NEAR addresses to EVM, Bitcoin, and other chains. NEAR accounts will be able to request transaction signatures for other chains, enabling developers to build multi-chain apps directly within NEAR smart contracts.
The final layer is the unified experience—or application layer (e.g., DapDap)—providing a way to interact with apps across chains without switching or leaving a single interface. Decentralized frontends can offer easy-to-build chain-abstraction components. NEAR achieves this via NearJS, combining data indexing and decentralized frontend capabilities—V2 launching in March 2024 as well.
How is NEAR achieving chain abstraction?
Since 2018, the NEAR ecosystem has pursued the vision of chain abstraction, focusing on usability, flexible account models, and highly scalable blockchains capable of supporting mainstream apps for billions. Today, the stack has evolved to support full-chain abstraction across cross-chain operations and diverse applications.
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Scalable, integrated blockchain capable of growing to over 1 billion daily active accounts
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Secure aggregation stack powered by NEAR DA, zkWASM (in collaboration with Polygon Labs), and Fast Finality via EigenLayer
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Account aggregation built on top, enabling transactions across all chains using a single account
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Data layer supporting everything from monolithic, integrated, modular, private, and permissioned chains to predictable protocol-based data queries
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Intent relayers leveraging this infrastructure to execute complex cross-chain intents
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Decentralized frontends providing discoverability and composability across multiple apps on multiple chains, unified into one experience
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Super (app) wallet that’s user-friendly and enables browsing all of Web3 without switching networks or managing gas tokens and bridges
Critically, each of these layers supports builders from across Web3—including Ethereum, rollups, and L2s—turning the multi-chain future into a chain-abstracted future.
In conclusion
2024 is the year to hide the complexity of multi-chain infrastructure and deliver the Web3 experience we’ve been striving for. Improving usability and discoverability should be the top priority for all Web3 builders, alongside solving liquidity fragmentation and security trade-offs.
Let’s make chain abstraction a movement. The NEAR ecosystem invites builders from across Web3 to leverage our solutions and collaborate with us to build even more chain-abstracted tools.
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