From marketing slogans to value creation, the three stages of chain abstraction

Original author: Austin King

Original translation: TechFlow

Most people still dont quite understand what the chain abstraction is.

Is this just a buzzword used by teams to attract VC investment, or will it really have a huge impact like the modular movement?

Frankly, it’s both, but many people overlook the fact that it develops in stages.

In this post, I will analyze where we are currently and where we might be by the end of 2025. What will happen to the market when retail investors gradually realize that the dream that VCs painted for them is not real and intend to use them as liquidity at the exit.

Phase 1 (Q4 2024 and Q1 2025, stable and threat-free)

Congratulations - if you’re reading this and have missed out on the huge benefits of the modular wave that Celestia sparked in 2021, this is your next opportunity to get in on the action that’s driving industry change on a similar scale.

We are now at the very beginning stages of chain abstraction. In reality, only a few companies have a clear theory on how to properly build this concept, and even fewer have enough engineering prowess to get started.

So, what is real today and what is just propaganda?

The reality is that the most promising teams are only at the stage of technology development and are able to show proof-of-concept demonstrations. However, these protocols are not yet widely used in actual production. While somewhat disappointing, are these early proofs of concept promising?

Currently, we are basically in an extremely complex and difficult to use crypto environment. Users need to consider gas fees, mnemonics, RPC endpoints, gas fees on other networks, which chains our tokens are on, which chains the applications we want to use are on, etc. - the complexity has reached a limit on the number of people willing to go through these tedious steps.

The companies currently focusing on chain abstraction are taking a step-by-step approach to solving problems — they try to solve two or three complex problems that users face. This is the proof-of-concept project currently being presented to the public.

The impact of this stage will be limited, and the entire industry will remain in this stage in the fourth quarter of this year and the first quarter of next year (I have had in-depth exchanges with some leading teams, and this is my preliminary judgment based on their roadmaps).

It will be interesting to see — but people will probably still view chain abstraction as a new buzzword/marketing term used to attract investment. While there will be evidence of real progress on mainnet, it won’t be enough for the industry to make a major shift around this design paradigm. On the positive side, though, if you dig deeper, you’ll start to see companies on mainnet that have the potential to become key leaders in the space and position themselves when most people aren’t paying attention.

Phase 2 (Q2 and Q3 2025, beginning of L1 psychological warfare)

By the second quarter of next year, people will start to see more and more instances of chain abstraction in the applications they use without having to actively look for chain abstraction projects - the user experience will be improved in a way that is compatible with existing systems.

They might hear about a friend using a wallet designed as a “universal account” that allows them to use their funds anywhere. They might top up their margin account for a perpetual swap protocol and realize afterward that the protocol is on Arbitrum, but they actually deposited from Optimism without even realizing they needed to consider these details.

This is when we’ll see a new wave of people start to understand what’s actually going on. If you’re a founder, this might be a good time to start raising money in earnest. VCs will start to realize “there’s a huge untapped opportunity here” because they’ve seen the potential of this design paradigm on mainnet, but they also understand that this is just the beginning and there are a lot of high-leverage opportunities to participate.

As we approach the end of Q3, few can deny that chain abstraction will revolutionize the way end users access these networks. We will begin to see:

Using applications will become easier, and many applications will receive more funding, unlike the infrastructure projects that VCs currently invest in that have no real application.

By then, there may be only two or three infrastructure companies that adopted this design paradigm early on and will take the lead in chain abstraction.

This will cause one of the most interesting culture clashes I’ve seen in my seven years in crypto. Almost everyone in the space holds a ton of L1 tokens. Currently, we live in a culture where people strongly identify with one smart contract platform, like Ethereum or Solana. This change will happen first in the Ethereum ecosystem, in the name of “making Ethereum a full network again,” but will soon extend to all blockchains.

From a psychological perspective - if you hold crypto, your primary investment is almost certainly in BTC, ETH, SOL, or some other L1 token. In addition, L1 teams are the best funded in the industry, and they have a large network of key opinion leaders (KOLs) to promote their views. Add to that the fact that the largest VCs have already invested hundreds of millions of dollars in L1 projects, and they must achieve multiple returns for their limited partners (LPs) or their investor reputation will be severely affected.

At first, these people will accept chain abstraction when it’s limited to “making Ethereum a full network again.” But once chain abstraction starts to threaten L1 networks’ status as hubs for value accumulation, the best-funded entities in the industry will coordinate a massive psychological warfare campaign to try to convince you that L1 is still where you should invest.

Phase 3 (Q4 2025 and beyond, major decoupling)

The end of this year will be a tough time for many investors. People are against chain abstraction not because they don’t like its prospects or think it’s good for the industry, but because they have hundreds of millions of dollars in financial interests and need to convince ordinary investors that the L1 project they are promoting will bring the best returns.

This phase will be very interesting as it will be a battle between large, well-funded and biased VCs and empirical data that is gradually showing that revenue is closer to order flow origination than to underlying L1s (e.g. Ethereum, Solana, Sui, etc.).

In the first half of 2025, it will be relatively easy and positive for projects to participate in chain abstraction, but as time goes on you will see more and more heated debates across the industry, with people making up all kinds of reasons to explain why L1 will still accrue value and why chain abstraction is a scam.

What does this mean for the average person active on crypto Twitter? For now, it still makes sense to put your money into the projects that are getting the most attention. That’s the reality of the industry today, and very little is based on fundamentals. However, as we head into the next year, you need to look at the bigger picture of where the space is headed. You may see some data that makes you think “wow, chain abstraction is really here, I need to move my investments towards applications and protocols that handle order flow origination because they’re driving the most revenue” – but it’s actually not rational to adjust your investments at that point in time. If you’re the type of person who follows me and digs deeper into where the industry is headed, you need to realize that you’re not part of the average retail investor group that will massively change their investment direction in the future. You need to look at this data through the lens of “will this data about chain abstraction protocols increasing revenues make retail investors realize that large VCs are using biased and self-serving narratives to target them as exit liquidity?”

When retail investors start to realize this, the industry will experience unprecedented and drastic changes. We are finally learning how to evaluate crypto networks. The vested interests will obscure this as much as possible to maintain retail exit liquidity, but it is becoming increasingly clear that they have invested too much in infrastructure projects that have no practical use. They will be extremely panicked because they cannot rely on the expected retail exit liquidity and will do everything they can to maintain this situation because, frankly, their entire careers depend on it.