White-paper of POCA, by NUTS Research
POCA (Protocol Oriented Chain Abstraction) introduces a pioneering approach to enhancing blockchain interoperability and scalability. By unifying asset management and protocol interactions under a cohesive abstraction layer, POCA empowers developers and users to seamlessly interact with multiple blockchain ecosystems. This white paper outlines the technical architecture, security frameworks, and decentralized governance mechanisms underpinning POCA. Our solution streamlines user experiences while fostering robust security and performance.
We are living in a world where the success of interoperability and modular architectures has led to the emergence of a myriad of connected chains. Each day brings new chains and ecosystems, all seem interconnected — but yet requiring manual intervention to transfer assets across them.
For instance, if a user wants to move a popular asset like native USDC from one chain to another — they must (1) burn it using CCTP protocol on, say, Solana, (2) get the Circle attestation from off-chain API, (3) switch to Ethereum and then (4) manually pick it up to mint USDC.
While not possible for USDC just 2 years ago, this is still very far from user expectations.
Users want to be able to use assets and services independent of the underlying infrastructure. They don't want these discrete separate experiences. They don't want to think about intricacies of each of these chains. Instead, they desire seamless interactions that abstract away the complexities of cross-chain operations.
Imagine booking a travel through a website. From the end user’s perspective, they search for a destination like Bangkok and receive a ton of options. Some may care about Boeing vs Airbus, others about economy vs first-class, or avoiding specific layovers. However, once they decide on options they want, they push a button and get a ticket. The highly sophisticated orchestration required to coordinate between multiple airlines and airports in different countries, service and payment providers, possibly in completely different jurisdictions, is hidden from end users, providing a simple, intuitive and streamlined experience.
Similarly, in Web3 space, we need to deliver the kind of experience that users are used to in Web2 by orchestrating activities across multiple chains. This will allow end users to engage with dApps without worrying or even knowing about technical details of each blockchain.
The current state of Chain Abstraction requires users to deal with complicated processes that are not user-friendly. Developers face technical and even mindset challenges when building dApps that need to interact with multiple chains, leading to high development overhead, suboptimal UX choices and increased security risks.
We have so many bridge types — but yet the user experience is far from seamless. Each chain represents a separate domain with its own native gas tokens, protocols and interfaces, requiring specialized knowledge to navigate. Each interoperability solution requires integrators to adopt to different practices that are significantly affecting possible options and thus end products. This fragmentation hinders the adoption of decentralized technologies and prevents users from fully leveraging benefits of connected crypto ecosystems.
There is a pressing need for an application-level development framework that abstracts these complexities, providing a unified programmable layer for building seamless (chain-invisible) user experiences.
The escalating competition among crypto ecosystems will eventually lead to simple, streamlined products with Web2-like user experiences tailored for the mass market. We foresee products that will not require users to understand all of the related fundamental questions on how chains or ecosystems work, which wallets to use, which assets to pay fees in, where to acquire it, etc.
To achieve this major shift, we must empower developers with frameworks that operate at higher levels of abstraction than current solutions. This includes providing the technical capabilities to implement agreements between dApps and their users through application-level transactions. Such application-level scenarios may be composed of multiple chain-level transactions (in this context — sub-transactions) and are targeted on multiple, often incompatible, chains.