Chain Signatures utilizes a decentralized multi-party computation (MPC) network enabling NEAR accounts to sign transactions on any blockchain protocol. Chain Signatures are the only MPC solution where smart contracts can sign transactions on any chain and for any number of accounts. This is because accounts are smart contracts by default in the unique NEAR account model. 

Chain Signatures reduce the work of multichain dApp development to a single layer: a smart contract on NEAR that can talk to all other chains. In this way, Chain Signatures abstract away the complexity and hassle of multichain dApps, for developers and users alike, and open up an entirely new design space of applications and user interfaces for Web3. Additionally, while existing bridges or cross-chain messaging protocols cannot support all chains or scale at speed, Chain Signatures can support every blockchain without native integration, whether Ethereum, Bitcoin, the Cosmos ecosystem, or (soon) Solana.

Five applications with more than 6 million active users between them are already using Chain Signatures Mainnet as of launch, with more than fifteen projects actively building. Soon there will be a full ecosystem of Chain Signatures products across this new design space, ranging across wallets, DEXs, lending, trading bots, bridges, and more. 

• Sweat Wallet: 2.5 million active Sweat Wallet users (on NEAR) can bridge assets to and from any chain, starting with BNB and Base, while paying for gas in $SWEAT.
• Allstake: Allstake is now live at Phase 0 with mainnet launch on NEAR, Solana, and Ethereum, supporting top LST and LRT protocols such as LiNEAR Protocol, MetaPool, Marinade, Jito, Renzo, and EtherFi.
• HERE Wallet: Mobile, Web, and Telegram wallet supporting transactions on any chain. Check out this Hot Protocol (by Here Wallet) demo.
• Bitte Wallet: Passkey wallets for any chain, including Bitcoin. Connect to all Ethereum apps with Bitte Wallet using WalletConnect. Watch a demo of how Bitte Wallet is using Chain Signatures here.
• Defuse: Truly multichain spot DEX. Trade between any assets on any chain in seconds. See how NEAR Chain Signatures are transforming DeFi in this demo.

Kendall Cole of Proximity Labs – a contributor to Chain Signatures – said, “Chain Signatures is pivotal to replacing the fragmented Web3 landscape with a single user and developer layer that addresses current interoperability challenges. This innovation simplifies the user experience, enables DeFi for blockchains like Bitcoin that do not traditionally support smart contracts, and empowers developers to support all chains seamlessly. By eliminating the need for bridges, Chain Signatures can significantly expand the liquidity and utility of assets across various blockchains. We’re excited to see Chain Abstraction in the wild, transforming how users and developers interact with decentralized finance and making it more accessible.”

Another key layer of the Chain Signatures stack is the Multichain Gas Relayer. Instead of forcing users to acquire a separate gas token every time they transact on a new chain, the Multichain Gas Relayer performs the gas payment on the destination chain, on the user’s behalf. The user only needs to pay the equivalent amount in an asset they already hold, whether that’s NEAR or other NEAR-native fungible tokens (such as USDC or USDT). The power of Chain Signatures, together with the gas abstraction of the Multichain Gas Relayer, offers a streamlined user experience as exemplified by top dApps like Sweat Wallet. 

Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of Near Protocol and CEO of NEAR Foundation, added, “Chain Signatures is a game-changing innovation that brings Chain Abstraction to life. Whereas before we had fragmented liquidity in DeFi, now there will be a single DeFi layer for all chains. There is no more need for dozens of wallets and addresses, manual bridging, and paying gas fees in every token. Instead, all of DeFi is accessible from wherever users already are. It’s all possible because smart contracts can now sign transactions for any blockchain, even Bitcoin. This opens up a whole new design space for financial apps in Web3, benefitting degens and also paving the way for new user bases.” 

As of mainnet launch, Chain Signatures’ MPC network is secured by eight reputable validators: Pagoda, Luganodes, The Lifted Initiative, InfStones, Staking4All, Node.Monster, Black Sand Technologies, and Aurora. The initial audit for the Chain Signatures protocol has been conducted by Kudelski, the final report of which will be published soon on the Chain Signatures GitHub. 

The Chain Signatures development roadmap includes adding EDDSA support before the end of the year, increasing throughput, and increasing the number of nodes. As of mainnet launch, Chain Signatures supports all blockchain protocols based on the ECDSA elliptic curve, which includes most chains such as Ethereum, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and recently, NEAR. With the additional support for the EDDSA elliptic curve (e.g. Solana, TON), Chain Signatures will be able to sign transactions on every known blockchain by Q4 2024. By the end of the year, Chain Signatures will aim to increase throughput up to 300 transactions/second to match NEAR’s sharded capacity. Finally, the number of validators on the network will gradually increase over time with the aim of achieving 40+ highly independent nodes, which would require 27 for a single signature.

For all app builders in Web3 who want to build multichain experiences from day one, explore these resources and start building:

• Chain Signatures: Getting Started Guide
• Multichain Gas Relayer: Getting Started Guide
• Request support for building with Chain Signatures
• Join the Chain Abstraction Dev Group on Telegram

All the above resources and more can be found on the Chain Signatures landing page: https://near.org/chain-abstraction.

The post Chain Signatures Mainnet Launches: Smart Contracts Can Sign Transactions on Any Blockchain appeared first on NEAR Protocol.

Chain Signatures is a groundbreaking technology built on NEAR that enables NEAR accounts, including smart contracts, to sign and execute transactions across multiple blockchains. This innovation leverages Multi-Party Computation (MPC) and a distributed network of node operators to create joint signatures from arbitrary payloads, allowing NEAR users to control external blockchain accounts. This technology enhances blockchain interoperability, giving ownership of diverse assets, cross-chain accounts, and data to a single NEAR account.

How Does It Work?

Chain Signatures operates through a series of steps to enable seamless cross-chain transactions:

1. Deriving Foreign Addresses:
   • Chain Signatures uses derivation paths to represent accounts on foreign blockchains.
   • The NEAR account’s name and the derivation path are used to mathematically derive a unique address for the user on the foreign blockchain.
2. Creating the Transaction:
   • The client constructs the hash of the transaction to be signed, which varies by the target blockchain.
3. Requesting the Signature:
   • A NEAR account or smart contract calls the sign method of the MPC smart contract (v1.signer) to sign a payload.
4. Relaying the Signature:
   • The client reconstructs the valid transaction using the signature and broadcasts it to the destination blockchain.

This process eliminates the need for traditional bridges and enables developers to build innovative cross-chain DeFi applications with seamless user experiences.

Use Cases

1. DeFi on Bitcoin (and other chain without smart contracts)
   • Chain signatures allow NEAR smart contract to program assets on Bitcoin.
   • Build lending, swaps, runes launchpads, passkey-based Bitcoin wallets, and more.
2. Chain agnostic applications
   • Since chain signatures can sign transactions for all blockchains, developers can support every single chain with just one smart contract.
   • Multichain DEXs, lending protocols, oracles, derivatives, and more.
3. Multichain account abstraction 
   • Users can control assets on all chains with just their NEAR account, and can utilize account abstraction features on any chain including passkeys, key rotation, etc.
   • Using the multichain gas relayer, users can pay for gas fees on any chain using USDC.
4. Privacy
   • Chain signatures can be used to encrypt and decrypt information in a programmatic way.
   • This enables privacy applications, and even decrypting information based on ownership of assets/NFTs.

How to Get Started?

1. Familiarize Yourself with Chain Signatures:
   • Understand the basics of Chain Signatures and how they simplify blockchain interactions.
   • Review the technical explainer.
2. Explore the Use Cases:
   • Review examples of use cases for Chain Signatures, such as Multichain DAO, Multichain NFT Minter, and Bitcoin Runes Airdrop.
3. Access Resources and Documentation:
   • Visit the Chain Signatures documentation for detailed technical information and code snippets.
   • Check out the Linktree for Chain Signatures for various resources, including demos and tutorials.
4. Try the Demos:
   • Use the command-line-based demo to derive accounts and send transactions on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Doge, and Ripple.
   • Check out the web app demo.
5. Engage with the Community:
   • Join the Chain Abstraction developers’ channel on Telegram to connect with other developers and get support.

Where to Learn More?

• Technical Blogs and Deep Dives:
  • Read high-level use cases and technical explainer posts on the NEAR blog.
• Community and Support:
  • Engage with the NEAR community on X and participate in discussions to stay updated on the latest developments.

The post Getting Started with Chain Signatures appeared first on NEAR Protocol.

NEAR’s vision of chain abstraction to facilitate broad adoption of decentralized apps requires an extremely scalable blockchain layer. From the start, NEAR has been designed to scale with demand towards mainstream adoption. A primary benefit of the new sharding implementation will be an up-to-10x speed improvement to NEAR’s already-fast transaction throughput. Sharding is NEAR’s unique approach to scaling, which partitions the blockchain into multiple parallel “shards.” Combined with NEAR already having the lowest transaction fees in Web3, this sharding upgrade positions NEAR at the forefront of Web3 in terms of both performance and scalability. Phase 2 greatly improves the network’s capacity for end user volume and is an important landmark on the road to global-scale usage of Web3. 

“NEAR continues to make progress on bringing Chain Abstraction infrastructure that can scale to a billion users and beyond,” said Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol and CEO of NEAR Foundation. “The scalability improvements from stateless validation can unlock even better user experiences for more end-user applications, whether multichain DeFi-style dapps or those aimed at mainstream users.”

Phase 2 introduces the most significant changes to the NEAR Protocol since its Mainnet launch in 2020. The biggest of these is the implementation of stateless validation: an innovative approach to state change, or the process of updating the status of all the data posted to the blockchain. Now, NEAR validators no longer have to maintain the state of a shard locally and can retrieve all the information they need to validate state changes, or “state witness,” from the network. 

With stateless validation, NEAR can finally achieve the truest form of sharding, where shards can function mostly independently at the consensus level to improve decentralization and throughput while preserving the highest security guarantees. An added benefit is that the hardware requirements to run most validator nodes are dramatically reduced (a smaller number of “chunk proposer” validators with specialized hardware will validate blocks with state held in memory). This also paves the way for greater decentralization of the network by lowering the barrier to entry to become a validator.

“We’re very excited about the potential for future proofing the NEAR protocol design with stateless validation,” said Bowen Wang, Director of Protocol at Pagoda. “From a research perspective, we expect that as zero-knowledge tech matures, more protocols will adopt a similar approach, where a smaller set of expensive machines execute transactions and produce proofs, while a bigger validator set validates the proofs. This will enable more unified security across networks and defragment Web3, advancing a key aspect of the chain abstraction vision.” 

Phase 2 is a shift in direction from the original Nightshade sharding architecture NEAR launched with in 2020, bypassing some fundamental roadblocks in that protocol design around the implementation of challenges in the initial idea of Phase 2, while also unlocking additional benefits. Other network improvements in Phase 2 include in-memory trie, wherein validator nodes can load the entire state into RAM for maximized performance. This will greatly improve transaction throughput thanks to minimizing storage access. 

NEAR users should not experience any downtime with the transition to Phase 2 and no special action is required from validators, apart from adjusting hardware specs. Through dozens of protocol upgrades since Mainnet launch, including three major upgrades, the core NEAR protocol has had 100% uptime with zero disruption for developers and end users. 

On Thursday, February 1, Stake Wars IV: Attack of the Transactions will launch to incentivize battle testing of the new sharding architecture. Planned to run through March 31, the latest edition of Stake Wars invites community members to test features and generate traffic. For more information about participating and deeper technical detail about Phase 2, visit the Stake Wars page on Github. 

With the launch of Phase 2, NEAR becomes one of the only networks in Web3 to implement stateless validation to improve scaling and paves the way for further network performance and scalability improvements in the future roadmap. A technical paper with more detail about NEAR’s new sharding design is forthcoming later in Q1. Phase 2 is expected to launch on NEAR Mainnet in May 2024.

The post Phase 2 of NEAR Sharding Launches appeared first on NEAR Protocol.

Supporting the most users of any network in Web3 requires a scalable blockchain that is capable of having both high data availability and low-cost data posting in order for applications to scale to the level of mainstream global adoption. This post will explain NEAR’s technical approach to data availability and how NEAR DA, a solution designed for Ethereum rollups, will scale the modular ecosystem and defragment all of Web3.

The modular Ethereum ecosystem seeks to scale the network by separating the functions of a blockchain––settlement, execution, and data availability––into separate layers. The Ethereum layer-one simply could not scale to accommodate the level of demand it reached, particularly during bull markets, without prohibitively high transaction fees. This demand becomes even more problematic when users want to do swaps on Ethereum or post transaction data for layer-twos to the layer-one network. 

NEAR DA offers a solution to this scalability roadblock. With a simple architecture that is easy to implement and constantly improving efficiency, and thanks to NEAR having the cheapest transaction fees of any network in Web3, NEAR DA is an incredibly fast and cost-effective data availability option. Depending on the gas fees, NEAR DA is up to 85,000x cheaper than posting blob submissions on Ethereum and 30x cheaper than doing the same on Celestia. 

NEAR DA and the Chain Abstraction Vision

The NEAR ecosystem’s focus for 2024 is expanding chain abstraction across more chains & ecosystems, with the goal of abstracting the blockchain away from the user & developer experience. While the modular Ethereum ecosystem has made Ethereum more scalable in some ways, it’s also resulted in a lot of incompatible infrastructure and fractured liquidity that places a huge burden on app builders and end users to manage. The chain abstraction vision is that apps should just work with all chains, onboarding should be seamless, and things like gas fees and bridging should become invisible to end users. 

Data availability and NEAR DA play an important role in chain abstraction. As zero-knowledge technology enables unification of security across chains via state proofs, as described in the chain abstraction deep dive post linked above, settlement data will be easier to fetch from different networks. As dapps become truly multichain thanks to account aggregation and decentralized frontends, they can query data from multiple chains more easily when data is all posted in one place. Doing so on NEAR will be much cheaper for rollups.

How is NEAR DA Implemented?

NEAR DA leverages an important part of NEAR’s consensus mechanism, known as Nightshade, which parallelizes the network into multiple shards (essentially, multiple parallel blockchains). Each shard on NEAR produces a small portion of a block, which is called a chunk. These chunks are aggregated to produce blocks. All of this happens entirely at the protocol level and so is invisible to users and developers.

NEAR DA uses this infrastructure to an ETH rollup’s benefit. When a chunk producer processes a receipt, there is consensus around the receipt. However, once the chunk has been processed and included in the block, the receipt is no longer required for consensus and can be pruned from the blockchain’s state. The pruning time is at least 3 NEAR epochs, where each epoch is 12 hours. In practice, this is usually around 5 NEAR epochs, so data is available in the network for around 60 hours. Once the receipt is pruned, it is the responsibility of archival nodes to retain the transaction data. 

This means that NEAR doesn’t slow down its consensus with more data than it requires, yet any user of NEAR DA would have ample time to query transaction data. The advantage this architecture provides to rollups is cost-effective data availability, especially to those with high transaction volume, such as gaming chains. 

NEAR DA provides an out-of-the-box solution for developers, making it easy for rollup builders to make the most of NEAR’s infrastructure––which has 3+ years of proven reliability behind it. The Pagoda engineering team has already built three important components that are open-source and ready to be integrated into any OP Stack, Polygon CDK, or Arbitrum Nitro rollups:

• The Blob Store Contract: A contract that stores arbitrary data.
• Light Client: A trustless off-chain client that provides easy access to transaction and receipt data.
• RPC Client: A client to publish data blobs to the NEAR Protocol.

Rollup builders looking to work with a cloud-like service could also leverage NEAR DA’s rollup-as-a-service (RaaS) providers (list provided here), in order to utilize these three components all in one place in a more abstracted manner. 

What’s next? The Future of NEAR DA and Data Availability Sharding

Another advantage NEAR’s sharding approach offers to users of NEAR DA is the future scaling roadmap. The NEAR Protocol Engineering team recently announced the move towards stateless validation, the next phase of sharding. This will further decrease the hardware requirements of certain types of validators (chunk validators) and move the state into memory, which will allow for more shards and increase the decentralization in the system by lowering the requirements to become a validator in the system. 

This means that the number of shards will increase, greatly increasing the overall throughput of the NEAR Protocol. While NEAR is already fast, with 4 MB/s per shard with 4 shards, scaling towards n shards means that rollups, applications, and any other project or developer using NEAR will not have to compete for blockspace. This is a major contrast to the scaling limits of both monolithic systems as well as the modular ETH ecosystem and offers a substantial future-proof for anyone building on NEAR, including users of NEAR DA.

As the NEAR Protocol starts increasing the number of shards to n, the amount of data that has to be stored for a single shard decreases. Eventually, in theory every account on NEAR Protocol could potentially become its own shard. This allows running very light RPC nodes that would only track the shard that a given user is interested in. 

For L2s that use NEAR DA, this would mean running an in-memory RPC client that would only track the shard that your data blob contract is in for your retention period (for fraud proofs), or for a given interval of time (retention is configurable on the RPC nodes). Instead of relying on data availability sampling (DAS), a rollup can rely on its own shard by running a lightweight RPC through Data Availability with Sharding. The additional benefit here is that the RPC is also applying the chunks they are tracking, essentially acting as a validator without participating in the consensus, as opposed to statistical confidence with DAS. 

While Data Availability Sharding remains in the research phase of development, it shows the major advantages the NEAR Protocol design offers to many kinds of builders and ecosystems. As the Web3 space pursues mainstream adoption, the scalability hurdles of the first ten years of Ethereum will seem minor, and it is not clear that modularity alone will solve the problem. The NEAR ecosystem’s goal of mainstream adoption of Web3 means the network is available for all builders to use for creating great applications and delivering the next generation of the internet.

Fast, Cost-Effective DA is NEAR

As Web3 adoption grows and as the number of rollups continues to climb, the need to scale the modular scalability solutions becomes greater. NEAR offers its innovative, reliable technology as a data availability solution for rollups that can save time and money while future-proofing projects for an increasingly multichain (and cross-chain) future. The bleeding-edge research driving the future development of NEAR DA will provide rollups with even more advantages over time. Interconnecting and defragmenting Web3 via chain abstraction will be a major theme of 2024 and utilizing NEAR DA puts rollups at the forefront of this evolution.

The post Why NEAR Data Availability? appeared first on NEAR Protocol.

If we want to see mainstream adoption of Web3 because we believe a more open, decentralized internet that supports self-sovereignty for all people is better for the world, then we will need to do better.

The prevailing narrative in Web3 today is modularity, or separating out the different functional layers of a blockchain, i.e. settlement, data availability, and execution, for the sake of scalability. Layer-twos, optimistic and ZK rollups, data availability layers, sidechains, and state channels are all examples of modularity solutions. 

This proliferation of blockchains & rollups has led to a degraded experience for users and developers. Modularity and a world of many chains leads to more fragmentation of liquidity, apps, and users––a significant degree of complexity in the user experience that no mainstream user could ever be expected to navigate. This also applies to developers, who feel pressure to commit to a specific tech stack while limiting the audience for their application. Now when you build a dapp, you’re enshrining yourself into a small addressable market by choosing a single chain.

I want to propose a better vision for the entire Ethereum ecosystem and all of Web3: let’s work together on advancing mainstream adoption via chain abstraction. The idea is that blockchains must be abstracted away from the user so they are not barriers to entry or participation. NEAR has been focusing on this vision since 2018 and today has achieved the most users of any network in Web3: 12.4 million monthly active accounts and 34 million accounts overall. 

Here’s how we can defragment Web3 and onboard billions of users via dapps. 

What does this look like for the user? 

Let’s imagine how using a dapp should actually work: transacting across networks and navigating between experiences with ease, all within a single interface. As one example, Alice picks up her phone and opens KAIKAI from her lockscreen. She orders a smoothie from a local place and sees in the app that there’s a discount offer from her favorite clothing store, Maison, and orders a pair of shoes for the spring. Alice sees she has earned enough KAICHING rewards to get a badge from Maison, not knowing it’s an NFT on Polygon, and redeems it in her account. 

When she browses Maison on the KAIKAI app later that day, she notices that her new badge reveals an offer to buy tickets for an exclusive event at their store with a DJ she likes. She buys the ticket with KAICHING and receives 2 tickets, still not knowing it’s an NFT on Arbitrum. Since she gets a +1, Alice invites her friend Bob to come with her and pings him for his address. 

Bob sends his NEAR address to Alice and opens his app to check out the ticket. He sends Alice some ETH to say thanks for the invite and looks at the different cryptos he has in his account. Since he’s on the metro and has some time, he decides to buy some BTC and borrow against it with USDC so he can mint a Fighting Dragon NFT on Magic Eden. His friend Charles texted him earlier to get one so they could play each other in Year of the Dragon, a new game on NEAR where their dragons can battle each other for coins they can stake.

All of these interactions and transactions can take place in a single interface and in a completely private way. There are no wallets, no switching networks, and no transaction fees to deal with; those are embedded directly in the swap or the buy and handled on behalf of the user. Alice didn’t need to worry about which network the ticket is on and Bob can send her funds for the ticket in whichever crypto he wants, moving seamlessly into buying a different one the next second. All inside of an app. This is the level of seamlessness we should be striving for as an ecosystem.

How do we achieve Chain Abstraction?

Everyone building an app in Web3 will benefit from being able to access such a broad market of potential users as in this example––i.e. anyone who uses apps. Whereas today, developers choose a network based on access to liquidity or the users of a specific rollup or chain, in a chain abstraction future they can just build with the best tech. The users will show up for the best experiences. 

Imagine if a Gmail user couldn’t just send a message to an Outlook address––it doesn’t make sense. The same is true for Web3 addresses. The core assumption of chain abstraction is: end users don’t care about the underlying blockchain. They just want apps to work. In reality, blockchains are simply infrastructure to receive value out of Web3: security of assets from seizure, economic opportunity, removing middlemen for transactions, global permissionless identity, data provenance, entertaining experiences, and more.

The core goal of chain abstraction is to defragment the increasingly fractured modular landscape of Web3. While this will be most visible at the user experience layer, this defragmentation of liquidity and accounts is possible thanks to innovation at the security layer. 

Zero knowledge (ZK) introduces a principally new approach to ledger security. Whereas before one needed to trust a decentralized set of validators, now even a single computer can prove that rules were followed with a simple proof. This means that where before, developers would be forced to either build on a shared chain or spend immense resources to launch a new one, now they can just spin one up on their single server.

This new paradigm introduces the idea of cross settlement: as more chains become fully ZK provable, if some proof is published on other chains, there is no way to revert this chain without also needing to revert other chains. Transactions from one chain can also settle on multiple others via ZK proofs. This provides mesh security as all proofs continuously get aggregated, allowing the safe movement of assets between such chains.

In order to achieve unified security, two things are needed at the bottom of the stack: Data availability, which provides a way for everyone to sync even if the operator is offline, and a decentralized sequencer for applications that don’t have a central operator. 

The next layer is identity with that security unified. Users can have an address on all possible chains and move assets between them freely. From a user perspective, this should be a single account where they interact with apps on different chains, and assets either get bridged or swapped automatically. 

I call this “account aggregation” and will share more details about it in another post soon. NEAR will launch the next version of FastAuth in March 2024, which has mapping for NEAR addresses to EVM, Bitcoin, and other addresses. NEAR accounts can request to sign a transaction for another chain. This allows them to build multichain apps directly as smart contracts on NEAR. 

The final layer is unifying the experience layer, or the application layer (e.g. DapDap)––providing a way to interact with apps on various chains without users switching or needing to leave a single interface. A decentralized frontend can provide easy components to build in a chain-abstracted way. NEAR can achieve this through NearJS, combining data indexing and decentralized frontends––V2 also coming in March 2024. 

How is NEAR enabling Chain Abstraction? 

The NEAR ecosystem has been building towards the chain abstraction vision since its beginnings in 2018, focusing on usability, a flexible account model, and a highly scalable blockchain that could support mainstream apps with billions of users. Today, the stack has expanded to support full chain abstraction across chains and all kinds of apps. 

• Scalable, integrated blockchain that can grow to 1B+ daily active accounts.
• Security aggregation stack consisting of NEAR DA, zkWASM (collaboration with Polygon Labs), and EigenLayer-powered Fast Finality.
• Account aggregation on top of this to enable transacting on all chains using a single account
• Data layer that supports everything from monolithic, integrated, modular, private and permissioned chains to query data in a predictable protocol.
• Intent relayers that can execute complex intents across chains using this infra.
• Decentralized frontends that provide discoverability and composability for multiple apps across chains into one experience.
• Super (app) wallets that are user friendly and offer a way to navigate all of Web3 without having to switch networks or deal with gas tokens and bridges.

Importantly, each of these layers supports builders from across Web3, including Ethereum, rollups & L2s, and beyond––the multichain future is becoming the chain abstraction future. 

Call to Action

2024 is the year of hiding the complexity of multichain infrastructure to deliver the Web3 experiences we’re striving for. Improving usability and discoverability should be a priority for all Web3 builders, as well as solving for liquidity fragmentation and security tradeoffs. 

Let’s make chain abstraction a movement. The NEAR ecosystem invites builders from across Web3 to take advantage of the solutions we’re offering and to collaborate with us to build more chain abstraction solutions together. Stay tuned for more news on collaborations as well as details on an exciting event that NEAR Foundation will co-host at ETHDenver 2024.

Special thanks to Zaki Manian for conversations that led to this post as well as for his review.

The post Why Chain Abstraction Is the Next Frontier for Web3 appeared first on NEAR Protocol.

As a kid growing up in Ukraine in the ’90s after the dissolution of the USSR, I remember we watched the price of bread go from 1,000 karbovanets, to 10,000, to 100,000 in less than five years (until that currency was thrown out altogether and replaced with hryvnia). When I first started working as a software developer as a teenager, I kept my earnings in cash in my room because I already understood that we couldn’t trust corrupt banks with our money.

Between 2014 and 2016 alone, 77 banks failed in Ukraine. My grandparents still have their savings account bank books tracking the money they put away during the USSR years––but those savings don’t exist anymore. So even something that is yours, that you rightfully own, can go away if the system you’re a part of fails. The same thing is happening to millions of people living under hyperinflation, dictatorships, and war zones across the world, of course. And while these may seem like abstract or distant problems that won’t arrive at your doorstep, let me tell you from my own experience: nothing is guaranteed. 

Every system is as fragile as the rules holding it together. And the rules can change. They’re changing around us right now, and I believe we are approaching a point of no return. 

The Need for Digital Self-Sovereignty

We need to create new economic opportunities for people everywhere via self-sovereignty, which should be a universal right and which technology can now provide, not just nation-states as in most other points in history. For citizens of nations who’ve enjoyed economic security and a high degree of sovereignty, this may not seem like an immediate-term issue. But it is. 

The economics of tech companies leads inevitably to corrupting their original product or vision for the sake of profit in order to maintain growth, and more importantly, they naturally involve creating barriers for someone else to disrupt. In order to maintain their power, governments will use pressure and ingenuity in order to control their populations, too often to the point of violating human rights in the name of safety or security. 

We all use our phones and computers a thousand times a day, prioritizing convenience over self-sovereignty because until now, we haven’t had a choice. We are now approaching a tipping point towards a dystopian future that we may not be able to come back from, brought on not just by governments but by the economics of tech companies. What happens when these incentives increasingly collide and push each other deeper into the lives of individuals for the sake of maintaining control and profit? 

That’s right about where we are today. 

Changing the Stakes with Generative AI

Before founding NEAR, I was an AI researcher. I worked at Google where I contributed to TensorFlow, and eventually published a paper with a handful of colleagues called “Attention Is All You Need.” That paper introduced the Transformers architecture that powers ChatGPT, Bard, and most of the well-known LLMs behind last year’s explosive growth in AI. 

I was first interested in AI because of the 2001 movie, “Artificial Intelligence.” Changing how we interact with computing and augmenting one’s intelligence to maximize human potential was, and still is, very appealing to me. And I still think it has the potential to make human lives, organizations, even governments better. But like any other technology, in the hands of the wrong people or with the wrong incentives, it also has the potential to make our lives terrible. 

Generative AI is creating a universal and scalably personal method of enabling control and manipulation. Practically, it means your social feed and search results can ensure that you buy specific products or form a specific opinion. This will start in the form of commercial improvements that lead to more profit for tech giants: Netflix will generate a movie script that can shape your opinion, Facebook can reinforce that opinion by showing you more of it, and so on. This could even happen at a more fundamental level, such as flooding training data with specific information to influence all models trained on it. 

If this granular information and vector of manipulation on such a personal level can be extracted or bought, it will be, and then it will become a tool for control. If it’s stored somewhere centralized and hackable, it will be stolen––we see this constantly with Web2 giants as it is. If governments can get access to this data, they will use it to maintain or grow their power. 

The true danger that generative AI introduces is that this exploitation won’t just be on a systems level or a population level, it will become personal and incredibly specific. The depth of potential control and manipulation goes to the level of each and every human, no matter where they live, no matter where they keep their money. Such a powerful technology simply cannot remain in the hands of centralized companies, nor be too easy for governments to take over.

So What Should We Do About It?

So if people don’t yet feel the sense of urgency towards building new systems that uphold self-sovereignty, what will make it real for people? Changes in collective values are always driven by economic opportunity. The major revolutions of history started because of economic failures: American independence from Britain, the French Revolution, the collapse of the USSR, and so on. If people see ways to create better economic realities for themselves and their families, then they will turn values into actions. 

Creating new opportunities for people via self-sovereignty is what NEAR is about. Complete self-sovereignty  has been the NEAR vision since day one: we want to build a world where all people can control their own assets, data, and power of governance. This sovereignty must apply not only at the level of individuals but also the organizations and communities they create, and eventually societies. 

Self-sovereignty is a new primitive that hasn’t existed before today. One always needed to rely on some power of violence for ensuring rules are followed, most recently nation-states. One of the core principles of digital self-sovereignty is the ability to choose and switch between any service provider. There is no lock- in. There are no middlemen like banks or government agencies that can lose or steal assets, or change the rules on you out of nowhere. 

Importantly, this must also apply to AI. People need to own their data so they know what it’s being used for and so they can actively consent to personalized experiences they think will improve their lives. Models must be governed transparently, in public, with clear rules and monitoring to proactively manage risk and reputation systems to build more clarity around information and traceability. Web3 can help to uphold, scale, and manage such systems to ensure AI is a force for good while also preventing it from being too exploitable. 

Another major challenge, which is especially clear in governance but it also applies to corporations, is that when we select someone to represent our ideas for us as our delegate, they will always have their own interests and motivations in the mix as well. They don’t necessarily have nefarious intentions, it’s just a natural tendency. This is the “principal agent problem,” wherein the person elected behaves differently than the people who elected them or pay them would prefer based on their best interests. This is where AI governance systems can help by introducing neutral agents, where unbiased AI agents governed directly by a community can act on their behalf in a more reliable way. With transparent governance and monitoring, AI can be a force for good in individual lives as well as for the collective. 

A Vision for the NEAR Future

Despite my concerns about where the traditional tech paradigm is potentially heading, I remain a techno-optimist. I wouldn’t be doing this work if I didn’t think it was for the good of everyone, and I’ve read enough sci-fi to know that the outcomes of science and technology are much more about what people do with them than the tech itself. If we want something, we should build it. 

I would like NEAR to become a fully sovereign operating system that is equipped with a personal AI assistant that optimizes for users’ needs without revealing private information about the user’s data or assets. It should also be able to interact and transact with other people’s AIs and the community’s AIs peer-to-peer. I call this “user-owned AI.”

We also need shared community AIs, which are governed by the members of such a community. They represent the mix of needs and knowledge of all the members of such a community, from something like a small club or startup, to the city, to the nation-state, to the global level. There is always an opportunity to fork one community and create new ones. The community governs which data goes into training its community model, and can run inference (running live data through a model) privately in such a way that only the user sees input and output, while getting a proof that the selected model was used.

To facilitate this vision, a lot of pieces need to come together:

• Economic and technological opportunity to enable users to onboard en masse.
• Open source software across the stack, from blockchain tech to AI models.
• Blockchains must get abstracted away from the user so they are not barriers to entry or participation. I call this the principle of Chain Abstraction.
• Applications must provide a novel value unlock: for example, Cosmose and Sweat. These apps reward users and serve as an economic gateway into a broader ecosystem of opportunities.
• On-edge, meaning hyperlocal, AI models that are usable by individuals (and free of manipulation).
• Community-owned AI models with governance and economic opportunity, replacing everything from business ops to government agencies. Self-governance by the people, for the people, at scale with the help of technology and decentralized peer-to-peer systems.

Blockchains, peer-to-peer payments, Web3, zero-knowledge, very large language models and on-edge AI models: these are not separate technology verticals, but rather interconnected facets of a new digital paradigm of self-sovereignty. 

We have the tools to remake how we provide for ourselves, how we work together and govern ourselves, and how we consume and generate information. Without gatekeepers, fair and open to everyone. And this is not a futuristic vision: it’s possible to start experimenting and building now, before our fragile and outdated systems and structures get weaker or fail, before too much centralization leads to the worst outcomes instead of the ones we all design and share together.

––Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR and CEO of NEAR Foundation

The post Self-Sovereignty Is NEAR: A Vision for Our Ecosystem appeared first on NEAR Protocol.