Anurag Arjun, co-founder of Avail – a platform offering a unified chain abstraction solution, and Polygon’s layer-2 scaling solution, has expressed his concerns to Cointelegraph about the ongoing fragmentation in the crypto world as a result of current chain abstraction methods.
According to Arjun, every unique blockchain base layer has its specific security assumptions, which pose significant challenges to interoperability between different chains. He stated, “Each has its specific set of validators and crypto-economic security. Hence, there’s a need to establish infrastructure such as light clients, which is a major general bottleneck.”
He further opined that bridging between different chains involves a multi-step procedure of communication amongst blockchain networks. This process not only incurs high costs and security risks, but also leads to the creation of fragmented pools of users and capital, as pointed out by the Avail co-founder.
Traditional efforts to achieve interoperability have been focused on enabling the transfer of liquidity between different chains. However, this approach has only intensified the fragmentation in the crypto ecosystem, while also creating cybersecurity vulnerabilities that have resulted in several significant hacks.
For instance, the Wormhole Bridge was targeted by hackers on February 2, 2022, resulting in a loss of $321 million. This incident is considered one of the most significant crypto hacks and sparked a series of similar attacks on other bridges in subsequent months.
Chain abstraction aims to enhance the user experience and interfaces of crypto networks and decentralized applications by abstracting the technical aspects of blockchain for end users. The ultimate objective of chain abstraction techniques is to offer users a more streamlined and unified blockchain experience, enabling them to interact across different chains using a single interface.
A case in point is the Chain Signatures feature of NEAR Protocol, which allows users to authorize transactions across various blockchain networks directly from their NEAR accounts using a single wallet. NEAR’s chain abstraction solution has been lauded by users and investors for its simplicity, and it is being touted as a potential base layer for all blockchain interactions in the future.
