🧞ZetaChain: Universal blockchain?

New crypto framework?

Jul 29, 2024

GM and happy Monday frens🖖

The crypto space is fragmented as hell - you got dozens of L1s, L2s, rollups, sidechain, sidechain rollups... A bloody mess.

One company trying to do something with this is called ZetaChain, with their universal L1 blockchain for chain abstraction. Developers can build omnichain applications that span any chain from Ethereum to Bitcoin and beyond.

Here how they do it and why:

🌱 Once in a lifetime opportunity
🔗 Solving multi-chain issues with ZetaChain
📰 This week's news

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🤿Deep-dive: Abstract Web3 with ZetaChain?

ZetaChain is an L1 blockchain for chain abstraction and developer platform that connects any L1 and L2, from Ethereum to Bitcoin and beyond.

Insights from keynote by Lucas Bertrand, Director of Engineering @ ZetaChain from L2con! Watch full presentation here.

Multi-Chain Future

Crypto is multi-chain, there are many different solutions to create your own blockchain, and there will be many new blockchains in the future. This brings a lot of problems for developers and users.

If you take users who want to take full advantage of DeFi, there are many different wallets they need to interact with.

If they want to interact with multiple blockchains at the same time, it's a lot of different interactions with different technology, different standards. So it's a very complicated user experience.

It's also very complicated for a developer.

If a developer wants to take full advantage of the ecosystem, he has to deploy smart contracts on different chains, different technologies, and eventually learn different languages.

For this situation, multi-chain, we have solutions for this, new bridges, different solutions, but there are also problems with many solutions we have for building cross-chain applications. So there is a lot of fragmentation.

For example, if you're building applications using bridges, there are still different chains that you have to build on. It's also high risk. A lot of solutions use centralized multisig.

If you take the main vector of recent exploits, it is mainly around bridges. Most signatures have been compromised by exploits. So in space, building centralized cross-chain applications is something that is both hard to do and also very dangerous because there are a lot of exploits.

So the idea is, what if we just had a single place where you can build your applications and use any blockchain you want, and also for any user, use any blockchain without thinking about which chain you are using. That is the main thing that we are focused on. That is ZetaChain's mission.

ZetaChain's Mission

ZetaChain is addressing these challenges by building a universal blockchain that abstracts away the complexities of underlying chains for both developers and users. Their mission is to provide a platform where developers can build decentralized applications without worrying about which blockchain they are working on. Similarly, users should be able to interact with cross-chain applications without the hassle of using multiple wallets or navigating different protocols. They are focused on creating a seamless, efficient, and user-friendly blockchain ecosystem

Technical Architecture of ZetaChain

The way Zetachain takes it is through the universal EVM stack, which is layered architecture for representation for building cross-chain applications. So they're going to interface to the users and developers is what we call the chain abstraction framework, a framework to build and interact with cross-chain applications. This framework is powered by the universal EVM, which is an EVM connecting to any chains in the space.

This EVM is powered by ZetaChain itself, which is a proof-of-stake L1 blockchain. And then on the background, the entire protocol connects to any blockchains. So first the chain abstraction framework, this is what is interfaced to developers and the users.

Chain Abstraction Framework

This framework allows developers to build and deploy decentralized applications in a single place, making them automatically interoperable. Users can directly interact with the chain abstraction framework and access any chain connected to the decentralized application.

In terms of architecture, the chain abstraction framework is on ZetaChain, and each supported chain has a gateway, a single entry point for interacting with the decentralized application. For example, with a cross-chain DEX built on ZetaChain, you can initiate a swap by sending a transaction from Ethereum to the gateway contract or a message from Bitcoin to the gateway.

The universal EVM, which is natively interoperable, powers the chain abstraction framework. For developers, deploying smart contracts on ZetaChain is the same as on any EVM chain, with added libraries for handling assets from external chains. Once deployed, users from all connected chains can interact with your applications.

This setup simplifies both the user and developer experience. To interact with a universal app, you only need to engage with a single entry point on ZetaChain. Specifically, for Bitcoin users, interacting with ZetaChain is as simple as making a transfer with a memo to the gateway address

Future Developments and Integrations

Looking ahead, Zetachain is focused on expanding its capabilities and integrations. They're planning to integrate with IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication) to connect with the entire IBC ecosystem and improve the interoperability of our protocol. Zetachain is also exploring the integration of other messaging protocols, such as the OPStack messaging protocol, to automatically validate transactions from all layer 2 solutions deployed within the OPStack ecosystem. These developments aim to further simplify the user experience and increase the flexibility and scalability of our protocol.