Multichain Growing Pains: Where does Decent fit in?

Uniting crypto through seamless cross-chain transactions.

Last cycles' problems have bred today’s most exciting solutions.  High gas fees on Ethereum have been widely recognized as unsustainable, so today more layer 2 blockchains and app chains with higher throughput and lower gas fees are growing in traction. 

A thriving multi-chain ecosystem presents new problems to tackle — fragmented liquidity, cold start problems for new chains and applications, and an even more urgent stress on the importance of interoperability. Building a frictionless user experience for interacting between chains transforms interchain competition to network effects in a positive rather than zero sum game.  Rapid growth of mainstream applications leveraging the scalability and user experience provided by L2s is contingent upon the existence of a unified liquidity layer, and we’re building that at Decent. 

Identifying the Pain Points 

Liquidity Fragmentation

Today, users are forced to hold tokens across many chains so that they may interact with the applications native to the underlying blockchain the app is built upon.

This fragmentation even causes the language necessary to talk about crypto to be technical. One of the first questions asked when a new company emerges is “what blockchain is it on?” 

Many users still hold their funds on Ethereum, and in order to interact with the growing list of L2 applications they have to endure high gas fees and slow bridge times. For users to need to participate in such a process just to gain entry to an application is a massive point of friction — it’s a lot to ask of a user as a prerequisite just to show up. In a survey of hundreds of collectors, creators, and developers it was found that over 80% of users will opt to end their experience even if they intended to transact on a platform rather than going through the process of bridging and swapping if they do not have the right token on the right chain when they show up to use an application. 

Cold Start Problems

App chains and new Layer 2 blockchains are multiplying like rabbits. Some of the biggest success stories this summer include the birth of new OP Stack chains, like Base from Coinbase and Zora Network from Zora. 

In the current paradigm where users are forced to bring their own liquidity to an application or ecosystem, these chains and the applications within them face the challenge of requiring users to bridge tokens to get started using these chains. Where Zora and Base, two well-established brands, have been able to attract liquidity to their chains, it’s not a challenge new applications want to present to their users, and it’s certainly not a positive user experience. 

Zero vs. Positive Sum Outlook

The high friction of moving between chains has bred a culture of competition and tribalism, but by breaking down barriers between chains each ecosystem can better capture the rising tide that lifts all ships. To date, the competition between blockchains has taken the shape of a zero-sum game, meaning that because liquidity on one chain could only be used for transactions on that chain, each ecosystem has been competing for users’ liquidity. As transactions are able to be made cross-chain, this game shifts to being positive sum — any blockchain’s traction is more likely to be beneficial to other chains and the applications built on top of them as the total growth of the cryptocurrency pie is a mutually positive outcome.

How does Decent fit in?

At Decent, our mission is to unify the crypto space by providing a consistent and best-in-class transaction user experience at the point-of-sale. Our flagship product, The Box, enables 1-click cross-chain transactions using any token on any chain. The future is clear with The Box: one seamless onchain ecosystem in which users are met at their point of liquidity. 

The Box entirely abstracts bridging from the end-user experience. Consumers can hold their funds wherever they please, and worry less about fracturing their funds to conform to the destination chains applications are built upon. As The Box is able to be automatically compatible with new blockchains at the time of their creation, the cold start problem of sourcing liquidity will be one of the past. Blockchains and applications alike can now tap into the aggregated liquidity of the entire crypto ecosystem, all while providing the best checkout experience to their users.

Our mission is to build a unified crypto native payments layer. As more fiat is rotated into onchain currency, we believe this to be the payments network of the future. We’re here to be your partner — a helping hand to you as we all work together and in parallel to build blockchain-based products and infrastructure that will last well beyond our years as builders. Focus on your core application; we'll make sure that your end users have the best checkout experience and that your application can access the liquidity of the entire crypto market. 

At its best, crypto payments are the easiest, fastest, cheapest way to engage in digital and physical commerce globally. It feels inevitable at this point that cryptocurrencies will play a significant role in payment processing and settlement, with growing traction and early entry of industry giants like PayPal, Stripe, and Visa. As these commercial leaders make it easier and easier for mass audiences to trust and enter the onchain world, it’s the job of cryptonative companies especially to make it frictionless to access the amazing products and applications built onchain. With cryptocurrency on a collision course with the traditional payment systems, a new payment infrastructure stack including both on and offchain participants will become more valuable.

What’s Next: Unity

As the crypto activity continues to spread to more and more chains, solutions that enable users to interact across these chains without a hiccup are paramount for usability. Rapid growth of crypto will be catalyzed by a growth of mainstream applications and use cases, and, like we have seen recently with friend.tech for example, these applications will leverage the user experience properties of L2s. Application experiences are still too bespoke and siloed without crosschain liquidity-uniting solutions like The Box, which are necessary to realize truly seamless and scalable interaction. 

Decent will continue to find ways to make interoperability and multichain interaction as frictionless and easy as possible. The Box v1 is just the beginning of our offering to unite liquidity in the multichain world and connect applications to the global payment system — both with fiat and crypto.