GM. This is Milk Road, welcome to a surprise Sunday edition that’ll hit you like accidentally sending your boss a meme instead of a work file—awkward, but unforgettable.
FIXING CRYPTO’S USABILITY PROBLEM 🔧
“Chain abstraction.” Silly name. Very important solution.
It’s the process of making crypto work without the need for an instruction manual.
That means:
- No needing to check which chain you’re sending to
- No needing to find/buy the required gas tokens
- No manual bridging
One click, and it’s all done in the background (the user only needs to know what action they're attempting to complete).
“Ok, cool – better UX, blah, blah, blah – why should I care?”
Cause it can translate into $$$ over time:
The easier a useful technology is to use → the more people will use it → the greater the demand will be → the more ‘number will go up.’
Personally, I’m not in it for the money (please, please – hold your applause). No, I’m hoping chain abstraction will get me back into my family group chat…
Last month, my mom got so mad at me that she almost wrote me out of her will.
And if you knew the woman — you’d know that getting her to that level of frustration is a tall order (I’m a good kid and she has a super mild temper).
The source of her anger: Crypto.
See, I made the mistake of thinking the crypto user experience had reached a point where I could onboard my mom over the phone and everything would be fine…
I was painfully mistaken.
- After two hours of back and forth on the phone, she was tired…
- After explaining the concept of bridging, she was frustrated…
- After she lost $1,000 sending USDC to an exchange that didn’t support the L2 I’d set her up on — that was when the threats began.
It was rough. But I understood her anger! Here I am singing the praises of crypto, and what did she get from it?
Hours of frustration and a swift loss of funds.
All of this gave me one of the biggest wake up calls I’d had in a long time…
(Bigger than the time I realized that, for a man in his thirties, using finger guns in general conversation is not socially acceptable).
It became painfully apparent to me that, despite all the progress the space has made over the past few years — we are still woefully unprepared for mass adoption.
And we will continue to be, until we can make these two solutions a reality:
- One-click multi chain transactions for users (less steps, less friction)
- Simple chain abstraction implementation for developers (a tool shed, not a tool box)
Aka: Getting out of the way of both users and developers.
And it’s been known to show results! Check this out:
Helium Mobile (the decentralized mobile network built on expanded home wifi signals) allowed developers from two major US phone carriers to plug in to their network and share Helium’s coverage with their mobile subscribers.
(Subscribers who had no idea their phones were using blockchain technology to send/receive data).
In that time, Helium’s user base rocketed from 5,108, to 756,284!
While Helium’s $HNT token damn-near 3x’d from $2.95 to $8.24 in the same time frame:
Chain abstraction is a powerful thing!
But before the rest of crypto can reach Helium’s level of “so abstracted that users don’t even know they’re using crypto” – we first need to solve one-click multi chain transactions for users, and simple chain abstraction implementation for developers.
These are two very weighty tasks, so we’ve teamed up with some friends of ours to help us break it all down!
Agoric is fighting the good fight in the trenches of chain abstraction, building tools like their upcoming Orchestration API – which will make our crypto experiences smoother, and make sure our names are kept in any respective family wills.
So let’s break these problems down as simply as humanly possible, and look at how solving each of them could bring billions of new users to crypto!
1/ One-click multi chain transactions for users
It can sometimes be a little hard to appreciate how much of a mess the on-chain experience really is.
(Especially if you’ve been in crypto long enough to become used to it all).
But it really hits home when you compare it to the systems we’re accustomed to in the real world…
Imagine a shopping mall where every business had its own proprietary currency.
Want to go to Whole Foods? You need to buy their token.
Wanna grab something at Best Buy? You’re going to have to convert your Whole Foods tokens in Best Buy tokens in order to shop there…
Sure, it’d be doable. But it wouldn’t be enjoyable.
(Hell – having your money fragmented across different store-specific currencies would be a nightmare!)
The thing is…retail stores like Whole Foods and Best Buy have already implemented their own fiat-version of ‘one-click multi chain transactions for users.’
Customers can present cash, card, or cheque at the check out, and the point-of-sale software will seamlessly process it via a range of credit (e.g. Visa/Mastercard) and/or banking solutions.
While we (as customers) are none the wiser of it.
That’s what it means to bring chain abstraction to crypto.
A frictionless end-to-end experience that gets out of the user’s way, allowing them to easily explore a wide array of applications, across multiple chains, anywhere within the shopping mall we call ‘crypto.’
Unfortunately, this is much easier said than done.
Each blockchain has its own way of solving certain problems – and they all operate independently of one another.
So every time two chains want to become interoperable, they will likely need to overcome differences in:
- Consensus algorithms
- Transaction finality
- And data structures
From a development perspective it’s wildly resource heavy, and – to borrow a technical term used by one of our friends in blockchain development:
“Daunting as f**k.”
Which brings us to our next point…
2/ Simple chain abstraction implementation for developers
Dev talk can get real technical, real fast – so we’re going to turn our writing settings down to “so easy to understand that our idiot cousin, Frank could understand it.”
Settings adjusted. Let’s go.
Say you wanted to build yourself an online store…
You could code the whole thing from scratch, including the website, payment systems, bookkeeping software, etc.
…or you could just use a bunch of pre-existing software like Shopify, Stripe Payments, and Quickbooks – which can all be linked together via APIs.
(If these pieces of software were Lego bricks, API’s would be the circular teeth on top of each brick that allowed you to connect them).
Agoric is building similar solutions for crypto devs looking to bring interoperability to their respective chains.
Agoric’s Orchestration API acts kind of like an “IFTTT (If This, Then That) for web3.”
It’s a single resource where devs can access, implement and build upon pre-existing solutions, like the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol’s Interchain accounts – alongside their existing tech stack.
Which means, instead of having to solve new problems from scratch every time they want to support interoperability between a new chain – developers can often just copy→paste→build→voila!
(*Click* goes the Lego brick).
Now, here’s the kicker…
For traditional developers, blockchain ain’t an easy space to jump into – there are a wide range of new/niche coding languages used in the space.
Meaning getting them to switch to web3 is like asking an English-only speaker to write an essay in Mandarin.
But Agoric’s Orchestration API runs on JavaScript, which is the most widely used coding language in the world.
Easier developer transition = more devs = more innovation = more use cases = more users = number go up.
What’s even better is that this isn’t some ‘soon to be.’
Developers are actively using this technology to make chain abstraction a thing.
The folks at Noble are integrating Agoric Orchestration in the Noble Express application to deliver Fast USDC, a product which will enable customers to:
- Transfer USDC between EVM chains and Cosmos 10x faster than before
- Onboard users to new apps in a single session, drastically enhancing the user experience
E.g. Connect to the Noble Express app, using MetaMask (an Ethereum wallet), and rapidly transfer USDC to the Cosmos ecosystem – ready to use in any application!
It’s a hell of an improvement!
TL;DR A simplified web3 user experience won't be a reality until it's easy for developers to implement, but tools like Agoric's Orchestration API help solve that.
If you want to start orchestrating the multi chain the easy way, we can help you skip the line and get early access to everything that Agoric offers.
Just click the big blue button below to stay up to date with Agoric Orchestration!
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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.
