"Intent" and "Omnichain application" are the two keywords for this month.
Intent is no longer just a buzzword. There is ongoing research and detailed analysis in the architecture and applications. Various attempts to implement intent architecture have also been made. For instance, instead of the previous approach of building a separate intent chain like Anoma and SUAVE, Essential is creating an Ethereum Standard to operate intent, similar to the Account Abstraction Standard, ERC-4337.
Furthermore, there is significant development in Omnichain applications, which are applications designed to be chain agnostic. This can be considered in terms of standards and use cases. In terms of Standard, OFT-20 by Layerzero is gaining more adoption, with big projects like Metis announcing that its token will be migrated to the OFT standard. Additionally, on the use case side, Catalyst has announced its full-functional testnet, aiming to create liquidity in a chain-agnostic manner.
Source: Introducing ERC-7521: Generalized Intents for Smart Contract Wallets
Essential announced its EIP-7521 proposal.
An infrastructure for intents is being built by Essential, similar to how ERC-4337 operates. This infrastructure will include a separate userIntent mempool with solvers (similar to bundlers in ERC-4337) that will bundle them into a transaction and fulfill the requests.
The flexibility provided by this standard allows for the development of numerous applications. I believe that some widely adopted and hard-coded transactions will be built around ERC-4337, while more dynamic applications will be built using Essential.
Source: Interchain Stack Roadmap 2024
The Interchain Foundation has announced the "Interchain Stack" initiative, aimed at expanding the reach and applicability of the Interchain Stack.
This initiative is a great step towards coordinated development of Cosmos-SDK and has the potential to create opportunities for Blockchain as a Service (BaaS). With the ongoing efforts in the open-source environment on Cosmos-SDK, now is a great time for the software to mature and be utilized in various scenarios. It is also interesting to see that big web2 companies in Asia are building their blockchains using it.
*The data was collected from DefiLlama's raises page.
Socket has raised a $5 million strategic investment from Coinbase Ventures and Framework Ventures to expand its collaboration with Coinbase and further develop its cross-chain infrastructure. They have already facilitated over 2.5 million transactions worth $3.5 billion across 15 chains. Going forward, Socket aims to provide even more powerful primitives that unlock new use cases and simplify building decentralized decentralized applications across multiple chains for developers.
Essential raised $5.15 million in a seed funding round led by Maven 11 to build intent-based infrastructure and tooling with the goal of minimizing value extraction and maximizing user satisfaction. They are developing an intent standard for Ethereum, an intent expression language, and an intent-centric blockchain protocol to facilitate widespread adoption of intent-based architectures. With this funding, Essential has grown to a team of 10 people working to establish the foundations for an intent-centric future of blockchain infrastructure and applications.
Intent-centric architectures take intents as the fundamental primitive, allowing for generalized intents, counterparty discovery, solving of intents into transactions, and settlement. This breaks applications free from constraints of existing blockchain-centric models and enables new applications by composing intents across domains. By providing these core properties as primitives, intent-centric architectures have the potential to unlock even more novel decentralized applications that have not been conceived yet due to limitations of current architecture paradigms.
Babylon integrates with the Router Protocol, an interoperable blockchain built on Cosmos, to provide Router with Bitcoin's security and reduce its staking unbonding time. By leveraging Babylon's Bitcoin Security Architecture, events on Router are timestamped on the Bitcoin blockchain for increased security.
Chimera Chains allow atomic transactions across multiple blockchains by partitioning state into chimera partitions that can be updated transactionally across chains. Transactions within an atomic bundle can communicate with each other, allowing resources like hotel rooms and train tickets to be reserved transactionally across chains. By generalizing shared sequencers to work across chains with different trust models, Chimera Chains make cross-chain transactions faster, easier and more powerful for applications that require interacting with data on multiple blockchains.
UniswapX is a protocol that facilitates off-chain counterparty discovery and on-chain settlement of trades. It achieves this through the use of Dutch orders parameterized by an RFQ system. This innovative approach enables swappers to obtain competitive pricing from both on-chain and off-chain liquidity sources. Orders are filled on-chain after being competed for off-chain. The main goal of UniswapX is to enhance the user experience for swappers. It achieves this by abstracting gas costs, internalizing MEV for price improvements, and facilitating cross-chain trades.
Thanks to Kate for designing the graphics for this article.
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