The Rise of Chain Abstraction

From Paul Veradittakit

Unifying Rollups - Omni Network 

Recently, Uniswap Labs announced UniChain, a L2 designed for DeFi. Whether to control more parts of the blockchain stack, launch new products, or capture more value, more and more apps are making their own L2’s at an increasing pace. L2’s increasingly dominate transaction volumes and TVL, but are increasingly fragmented. L2 chains have to pick between isolated environments (like Arbitrum Orbit or the Optimism Superchain), modular infrastructure (like and bridges are often only built after launch (when there is enough liquidity to facilitate swapping).

Yet, chains still choose these isolated or modular infrastructure providers because they retain control over their rollups. To users, this creates a poor user experience because they still need to arduously move assets across various L2’s to use different protocols. Chain Abstraction is the idea that the user should be abstracted from the underlying chain infrastructure, meaning they can access any application no matter what chain they are on or what tokens they have. This concept is still very early in development, but one of the most interesting projects building in this space is Omni Network.

Chain Abstraction and Omni Network’s Release

Omni has approached this problem with two priorities in mind:

Omni solves this by introducing a frontend SDK that any application can integrate with on their website. It has no requirements that rollups opt into this architecture – it even does not require that teams building applications upgrade their smart contracts. From the user perspective, it is fully backwards compatible with existing wallet providers which means that users do not have to download new software, perform wallet upgrades, or alter their existing usage patterns. Before diving into the technical architecture of how this is achieved, here is a video demonstrating the user experience that this makes possible:

Omni simplifies the user experience by:

These are the core blockers preventing Ethereum from feeling like a singular platform to end users. Adopted at scale, Ethereum would once again begin to match the “monolithic” user experience of Solana, but now with the increased throughput and lowered fees that roll ups make possible.