DAPPCON 2024: Cross Chain Abstraction Under The Hood - Fig

Transcript

all right so I'll be talking about cross chain obstruction today um we live in a world which has a lot of VAR variability we have new chains popping up all the time new Innovations new virtual machines um and this is a good thing we like the diversity the the reason that we have innovation in the first first place is because new technologies can um you know launch and then gain new new users through um you know these permissionless means that we lack in web 3 and what this ends up with though is for users point of view you have treacherous terrain that you have to cover and um

you end up with just wanting to do one small thing on an application you have to do 10 steps go to like five different websites worried about getting hacked get gas whatever we all know this so well it's actually been a problem since back in 2020 when we started seeing chains other than ethereum launch and I'll be talking about how to solve this problem today um so you think that one chain where you can keep all your assets and put all of your expressions of your intents like whatever you want to do would be the answer but I think that is slightly um myopic what this might look like is let

see if I can go back with this pointer I can so we want this diversity right we don't want M to become the only roller of the entire Middle Earth or um you know one technology to roll everything in web 2 we have you know visa and MasterCard are the only payment rails for everything and we're locked into this technology which is from the' 70s we want the infrastructure layer to be just as permission this as at the application layer where you can plug any smart contract into any other smart contract and so we need to go back to what's important so we can build cross chain in the same way that Bitcoin was originally built so Bitcoin gave us ownership true

ownership where no one can take a value away from you and you can use that value to transact with whoever you want however you want um that's what I'm defining as interoperability here bit coin actually had amazing interoperability in the sense you could send money to anyone or receive it from anyone and when ethereum came along this goes up a layer and you have ESC 20s where you have different currencies like usdt and ethereum and interoperability here requires a market and that's what Unis swap gave us it gave us interoperability at the at one derivative up away from Bitcoin so we have ethereum USC 20s Unis

swap allowing us to transact with anyone in any currency and the quest of the day is we have cross chain and how do we have true interoperability now not only with different currencies but different virtual machines different gas models different ways of getting data and um what that looks like is a combination of all of the layers below so Unis swaps involved uh e20s are involved but now we have Bridges and cross chain swap applications and apis and you know I I'm from a project called squid which we do cross chain apis and uh developer tools and axela is a project we work really

closely with who's a bridge and general message passing protocol so this is how I've broken it down like consensus is essentially so social consensus enforced through protocols and you bring that all the way up to you know ethereum's protocol and now cross chain protocols and with the market squids handling cross chain swaps Unis swaps handling on a single chain and really importantly the application layer is exactly the same from the user point of view they shouldn't have to be aware of any of the stuff happening underneath so you may think or have heard the intents are the answer to this problem and intents are great this is a provocative Tire Tool but they're not

the full answer and it's evident especially with meme coins where an an intent Market is less likely to pick up uh liquidity and Pickups of demand for a meme coin so early on something like pump. fun is a transaction model and it allows you to anyone to enter the space with as a little bit more censorship resistance than intents um and if we think of intents as the solution to back at the start you might think we have one chain where you express your intent you keep all your value there and then solvers going magically do all your actions for you you lose a bit of the ownership

because there's you're now trusting a bridge to own a bunch of your assets and also this intent layer gets a bit of lock in it's whatever the intent layer can support or whichever bridges that supports are determined the only chains that you can interact with and you want to be able to download a new wallet or and interact with the chain if you want to so intents aren't the full answer but they do give us really good properties for cross chain they speed everything up and give you almost instant settlement and they let you get offchain liquidity which is great for um when you have assets which are also supported on binance and other exchanges you get similar prices um we use intents and Squid this

is a roller coaster that we sponsored because in the bare Market we couldn't afford Ford to sponsor an F1 car and we had a uh a race with all of our users and people were hitting subsec and cross chain swaps and people have saved years at this point um using intents on squid and so intents are part of the answer but the issue is that with true abstraction and being able to absorb all of this change you have all of these things that um the solution needs to handle it's like gas different virtual machine wallets different liquidity different token types getting balances how do you get data transaction rollups like

putting everything into a single click and this is all that you have to do now but imagine you know ZK is going to probably create some amazing cross chain opportunities you'll need a system which adapts to all of the new innovation that's coming so I think the answer is actually to use a combination of developer tools which are constantly CH able to constantly change as well and that's how we're approaching it at squid we have an API which gives you these transaction rollups and that's constantly absorbing new types of dexas new Bridges new cross chain methods an Explorer API which Aggregates all the Explorers um different RPC data we we

have indexing across like 60 or 70 chains um we use in models we use transaction models models we have hooks for doing things like buying an nft on another chain um anyone can program whatever they want and we have sdks for on the front end side because you have different wallets the you have to get balances on the front end like there's just so much complexity always happening that I think a constantly set changing set of Dev tools is the answer and these are some of the use cases it's all the same as single chain but you can do a cross chain um we've built our own checkout where you can buy any nft on openc in one click with any token in your wallet um

and we buil a chat based interface where you can you can just type whatever you want to do and you can do that on any chain so you can build the same applications as single chain and um yeah that's all i' have to chat to anyone if you have questions but thanks for having me thank you um we do have time for a few questions so if anyone wants to make some feel free to otherwise yeah we got one ah sorry I didn't say it um thanks for the presentation that was good um you mentioned about buying an nft on another Shain I wanted to ask

um an example say I have funds on chain I'm on chain a and there's a platform from on chain B and I have funds on this chain a can I using that SDK buy something on chain B given that I'm on a and with funs on a yeah exactly the way that we do it is with post we call them post hooks um so you get the call data for purchasing the nft on a single chain and you pass that in as the post hook and then in front of that you have the route for the swap between the token you have and the token you need to buy it so in this case say I have magic on

arbitrum and I want to buy aady on ethereum what's Happening Here is you get a quote for um swapping magic and eth across chain and then you add the post hook for buying the nft which is just a normal like buy an opy and um yeah it happens in under 20 seconds you just you buy it as you would normally with any okay anyone else okay well thank you so much for your presentation again no wor a round of applause