Arcana’s Chain Abstraction (CA) enables instant, bridgeless transactions, addressing liquidity fragmentation from ever-emerging chains.
Built on Cosmos app chain infrastructure, it’s a trust-minimized, scalable system that uses intent-based fulfillment for instant liquidity via a simple, pluggable FCFS solver—no auctions are required.
Developers can integrate the protocol into Web3 apps with the Chain Abstraction SDK.
This paper explains how Arcana’s solution lets users view and spend their unified balance across chains.
The rise of layer-1 and layer-2 chains has scattered liquidity, assets, and user states, making it hard for users to access new apps or features. Users must bridge funds or acquire native tokens, causing friction that limits app growth and user retention. For developers, this creates higher onboarding friction, lower user retention, and limited app growth.
Chain abstraction solves this by unifying cross-chain interactions. Users can access apps on any chain with a single balance—no swaps, bridges, or custody risks. This simplifies onboarding, reduces drop-offs, offers a more connected Web3 experience, and enables developers to build chain-agnostic apps.
Arcana's Chain Abstraction SDK lets Web3 developers enable unified balance for users in dApps.
This section defines key terms to clarify the challenges, solutions, and Arcana’s chain abstraction architecture, ensuring readers are aligned with the concepts discussed in the following sections.
An intent is a problem statement that expresses the user’s transaction goals without specifying how to achieve them.
Example: "In my EoA, I have 10 USDC on Optimism and 20 USDC on Arbitrum, and I want to send 25 USDC to Polygon address 0xnnn.”
A vault is a smart contract deployed by Arcana’s Chain Abstraction protocol on each source chain. It stores user funds after the user signs a cross-chain intent and prevents double-spending. While each vault handles funds on its respective chain, multiple vaults across different chains participate in the Arcana CA protocol, creating a unified balance view for the user. Vault guarantees fund availability to the solver and participates in the settlement process.
A solver is a lightweight program that monitors a channel for cross-chain intents posted by the Arcana Network Chain Abstraction protocol. There are multiple solvers in an ideal system whereby solvers race to fulfill the intents broadcast by the CA protocol. It is an FCFS system, and the first solver to fulfill the intent wins. Solvers can choose which routes they support and the preferred fees for each route. They can also rebalance their liquidity portfolio if required.