Forward the Original Title：对话 Cycle Network：全链应用、链抽象和基础设施发展方向

Since the end of last year, more and more people have been paying attention to the concept of chain abstraction. From account abstraction to chain abstraction, we can see that the market’s development is moving towards higher dimensions. ChainFeeds invited Robbie, CEO of Cycle Network, a team specializing in chain abstraction, to discuss the current status of omnichain applications, the narrative of chain abstraction, and the direction of future infrastructure development.

Cycle Network is a rollup L2 that enables developers to implement applications without the need for multi-chain deployment of contracts, and end-users are unaware of cross-chain omnichain ledgers.

The current situation of omnichain applications: developers are bound by multiple chains

TL,DR: Currently, many users and developers face challenges when using and building blockchain applications, especially decentralized ones. Users and developers often feel confused and inconvenienced, so most users are still concentrated on centralised applications. Chain abstraction and self-custody are expected to be future trends, allowing users to more easily integrate into the decentralized world.

Robbie: Regarding the current state of omnichain applications, for project developers, in the past, it may have been an era of single-chain dominance, where many developers would choose a particular network to deploy their applications. In the era of single-chain L1 competition, the construction cost of L1 is relatively high, so each L1 can absorb a relatively large user base, so there is still room for developers to choose a single chain to build applications. Now, you can see a trend towards modularization. In this context, many applications have shifted to building on layer1, and each layer2 network is competing for TVL. If applications still want to build in a way similar to the era of single chains, they will find themselves carrying a heavy burden across the entire web3 world, bringing about problems of fragmented deployment for developers. So, in such a situation now, the entire industry is facing various issues such as insecurity, expensive gas, cross-chain interaction delays, and high user complexity. Cycle Network aims to solve these problems. Cycle hopes the industry will return to an era where application development is the core, defining a new paradigm for omnichain ledger development and freeing developers from being bound by multiple chains.

Chain Abstract Narrative: Future Trends

TL,DR: The narrative of chain abstraction is a significant direction for future development. The goal of chain abstraction is to make users unaware of the existence of chains while enjoying the benefits of blockchain decentralization. With the emergence of the chain abstraction narrative, Cycle Network found this concept highly aligned with what they were building.

Robbie: At the end of 23, the concept of chain abstraction suddenly gained momentum, and this narrative indeed encapsulates what we want to achieve. However, we have also observed that there are many similar projects in the market trying to do the same thing as us. We had this idea back on October 22 because there happened to be an ETH Global Hackathon at that time, so we formed a small team to give it a try. At that time, we were thinking that enabling users to interact with data on the entire chain through self-management must be a significant trend in the future. Most users in the industry are currently entrenched in centralized applications, so what exactly is hindering users from entering a truly decentralized world? This applies to developers as well. How can developers focus on the development of their applications without being limited by the infrastructure they choose? So we initiated the Cycle project. The advantage of Cycle is that it allows application developers to deploy contracts across multiple chains using Rollup technology without the need for multiple chain deployments. Moreover, end-users are unaware of the existence of cross-chain, which is also the goal of chain abstraction.

The development direction of infrastructure: the explosion of rollup technology

TL,DR: The development of modularity has driven the explosion of Layer 2 and Layer 3 applications, which is essentially a boom in rollup technology. During the innovation stage of Layer 2 and Layer 3 applications, the maintenance cost of rollups is relatively low, enabling large dapps to build their own rollups.

Robbie: Initially, when addressing scalability issues, people tended to try to build monolithic high-performance blockchains. However, over time, with the development of rollups, modularity has become the trend. The development of modularity has brought about the trend of explosive growth in Layer 2 or Layer 3 applications, which is essentially a rollup explosion. Under this trend of explosive growth, Cycle is addressing the increasingly fragmented user and developer experiences. The name “Cycle” implies a cycle, indicating that we see a very definite form or even a final state in the development of infrastructure. We believe that in this final state, many rollups themselves will be huge dapps, with the deployment form of dapps having native built-in comprehensive rollup capabilities. Essentially, this is what Cycle is all about.

What differentiates Cycle from other projects?

TL,DR: Considering the need for fast entry and exit of multi-chain data, Cycle opted for ZK Rollup technology. The main difference between Cycle and other projects lies in its focus on building a trustless global ledger.

Robbie: In the blockchain world, cross-chain programming is asynchronous, where all business logic is executed asynchronously. We chose ZK Rollup technology because we needed to quickly facilitate the entry and exit of multi-chain data. After examining various options on the market, we ultimately chose Polygon’s solution due to its excellence in ZK Rollup technology and cost control.

Returning to Cycle’s original intention, we aimed to redefine the development paradigm of a new global ledger. Trustlessness is a belief in the world of crypto. It has always been a pursuit in the crypto world. Cycle maintains its original intention of trustlessness and has extreme requirements for trustlessness. Therefore, almost all of our resources are currently invested in the research and development of this trustless global ledger. Our goal is to facilitate the future of the entire industry with such a global ledger, allowing applications to freely program with omnichain data in a web3 world without being constrained by multiple chains.

We achieve trustless interaction across the entire chain through secure underlying chain communication. As is well known, L1 and L2 bridging is a two-way validation process, and as long as asset processing is normal, it is a trustless local bridge. We extend this feature to all external networks connected by Cycle, enabling trustless communication between various networks. This is essentially a problem of state anchoring in a multi-distributed system. We use an indexing mechanism to solve this problem, anchoring the state of multiple chains with Cycle’s state, thereby simplifying the problem of state distribution between multiple networks and achieving multi-chain ledger technology.

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