We saw a lot of growth in what I like to call the open web in 2023, despite the slow market for much the year. Zero-knowledge (ZK) tech made major strides, the layer 2 and rollup-driven stack took hold and new primitives launched capturing plenty of attention.
This post is part of CoinDesk’s “Crypto 2024” predictions package. Illia Polosukhin is the CEO of the NEAR Foundation.
These trends all laid the groundwork for what will be the major evolution for Web3 in 2024: chain abstraction.
The crypto industry is moving into an era of chain abstraction, where blockchains and other infrastructure will become increasingly invisible to users and to an extent developers.
See also: The Barrier to Mainstream Crypto Adoption Isn’t UX | Opinion
Developers care about distribution, access to users and liquidity and speed to launch –– as well as the security and reliability of the infra they’re using. Ultimately, most end-users — at least those using applications with mainstream potential — don’t care about the infrastructure an app is built on.
Users just want to get value and great experiences, quickly, easily and ideally for free. Hardly anyone thinks about or cares whether a webpage is running on Google, Amazon or something else, we just want it to work.
Zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) introduces a principally new approach to ledger security. Instead of needing to trust a decentralized set of validators, now through developments in ZK cryptography even a single computer can prove that rules were followed with a simple proof.
This means the difference between building on a shared chain with billions of dollars securing it (or spending immense resources to launch a new one), and spinning up a single server. In other words, security doesn’t need to be the deciding factor for developers when they are choosing infra — through recent advancements, transactions and value from one chain can settle on another (with some technical caveats).
People care about experiences and products, not infrastructure
This increasingly unified security across networks has major implications for app builders because it changes the set of decisions they’re making when they decide where to build. If you can prove what you’ve done with a ZK proof, it matters less where you’ve built it. Unifying security also…
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