Dialogue with Cycle Network: Full-chain Applications, Chain Abstraction, and Infrastructure Development Directions
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Dialogue with Cycle Network: Full-chain Applications, Chain Abstraction, and Infrastructure Development Directions
What about the narrative of chain abstraction? Will the development of future infrastructure rely on rollups?
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: 0XNATALIE
Since the end of last year, increasing attention has been paid to the concept of chain abstraction. From account abstraction to chain abstraction, we can see that market development is moving toward higher dimensions. ChainFeeds invited Robbie, CEO of Cycle Network—a team dedicated to chain abstraction—to discuss the current state of omnichain applications, the narrative around chain abstraction, and future directions for infrastructure development.
Cycle Network is an omnichain ledger leveraging rollup technology that allows developers to avoid deploying contracts across multiple chains while enabling end users to be unaware of cross-chain interactions. It can be viewed as a rollup L2 that interconnects all chains.
Current State of Omnichain Applications: Developers Bound by Multi-Chain Complexity
TL,DR: Currently, both users and developers face challenges when using and building blockchain applications, especially decentralized ones. The complexity often confuses and inconveniences users and developers alike, which is why most users still remain within centralized applications. Chain abstraction and self-custody models represent the future trend, offering a smoother onboarding path into the decentralized world.
Robbie: For developers building omnichain applications today, the landscape has shifted significantly. In the past, during the monolithic chain era, many developers simply chose one network to deploy their application. During the battle for dominance among monolithic L1s, the cost of participation on each L1 was relatively high, but each could attract a substantial user base—so single-chain applications had room to survive. Now, with modular architecture becoming the established trend, many applications are migrating to Layer 2s, where various L2 networks compete for TVL. If apps continue building in the same way as in the monolithic era, they’ll find themselves dragging heavy legacy constraints across the Web3 ecosystem, leading to fragmented deployments. As a result, the industry now faces numerous issues: insecurity, high gas fees, cross-chain interaction latency, and high user complexity. Cycle Network aims to solve these problems. We want the industry to return to an era centered on application development by defining a new development paradigm for omnichain ledgers and freeing developers from the burdens of multi-chain fragmentation.
The Chain Abstraction Narrative: A Future Trend
TL,DR: The chain abstraction narrative represents a key direction for future development. Its goal is to make chains imperceptible to users while allowing them to enjoy the benefits of blockchain decentralization. As this narrative gains momentum, Cycle Network finds strong alignment between this concept and its own mission.
Robbie: The concept of chain abstraction suddenly gained popularity at the end of 2023. This narrative effectively captures what we aim to achieve, though we’ve observed that many similar projects in the market are now attempting the same thing. We actually conceived this idea back in October 2022, coinciding with ETH Global’s Hackathon, so we formed a small team to experiment with it. At the time, we believed that enabling users to interact with on-chain data through self-custody would become a major future trend. Most users today are still concentrated in centralized applications—what’s preventing them from entering the truly decentralized world? And for developers, how can we allow them to focus solely on app development without being constrained by the infrastructure choices they make? That’s exactly why we launched the Cycle project. Cycle’s advantage lies in using rollup technology to eliminate the need for developers to deploy contracts across multiple chains, while also making cross-chain interactions invisible to end users—precisely the goal of chain abstraction.
Future of Infrastructure: The Rollup Explosion
TL,DR: Modularization has driven an explosion of innovation at Layer 2 and Layer 3, a trend fundamentally powered by the rise of rollup technology. During this phase of application innovation, the cost of maintaining rollups is relatively low, enabling large dApps to build their own dedicated rollups.
Robbie: Initially, people tried solving scalability by building high-performance monolithic blockchains. Over time, however, the evolution of rollups made modularization the dominant trend. This shift has triggered an explosion of applications at Layer 2 and Layer 3—the so-called "app boom"—which is essentially a rollup boom. Cycle emerges in response to this trend, addressing the increasingly fragmented experiences faced by both users and developers. The name "Cycle" reflects our view of the highly predictable—and even inevitable—trajectory of infrastructure evolution. We believe that in the endgame, many rollups will themselves become massive dApps, with native, built-in rollup capabilities. That's exactly the layer Cycle is building.
How Is Cycle Different From Other Projects?
TL,DR: Considering the need for fast inbound and outbound multi-chain data transfer, Cycle chose ZK Rollup. The main distinction between Cycle and other projects is its focus on building a trustless omnichain ledger.
Robbie: In the blockchain world, cross-chain programming is inherently asynchronous—all business logic executes asynchronously. We selected ZK Rollup technology because we must enable rapid movement of data across multiple chains. After evaluating various options on the market, we ultimately adopted Polygon’s solution due to its maturity and superior cost efficiency in ZK Rollup implementation.
Returning to Cycle’s original vision: we aim to define a new development paradigm for omnichain ledgers. Trustlessness is a core belief in crypto—it's what the entire crypto world has always pursued. Cycle remains deeply committed to this principle, setting extremely high standards for trustlessness. All our resources are currently focused on developing this trustless omnichain ledger. Our ultimate goal is to foster an industry-wide omnichain ledger that enables applications to freely program across all chains in the Web3 world, finally breaking free from multi-chain constraints.
By establishing secure underlying communication protocols, we enable trustless omnichain interactions. As widely known, bridging between L1s and L2s involves bidirectional verification; as long as asset handling functions correctly, it constitutes a trustless native bridge. We extend this property to all external networks connected to Cycle, achieving trustless communication across chains. At its core, this is a problem of state anchoring across distributed systems. We solve it using an indexing mechanism that anchors multi-chain states to the Cycle state, simplifying state distribution across multiple networks and realizing our omnichain ledger technology.
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