Today marks a major milestone: the official mainnet release of Chain Signatures, a groundbreaking chain abstraction solution developed on the NEAR platform. After successfully completing the testnet phase and a thorough security audit, developers can now leverage the full potential of Chain Signatures’ omnichain capabilities for their decentralized applications (dApps) on mainnet. This development provides a fully chain-abstract user experience (UX) for end users, including decentralized enthusiasts, through the first cohort of Chain Signatures products now live on mainnet.
The technology behind chain signatures
Chain Signatures is built on a decentralized Multi-Party Computation (MPC) network that allows NEAR accounts to sign transactions across any blockchain protocol. It is the only MPC solution that allows smart contracts to sign transactions on any chain and for any number of accounts. This functionality is enabled by the unique NEAR account model, where accounts are smart contracts by default.
This innovative solution simplifies the development of multichain dApps by reducing complexity to a single layer: a smart contract on NEAR that communicates with all other chains. By abstracting the intricacies and challenges of multichain dApps, Chain Signatures creates new opportunities for application design and user interfaces in the Web3 space. Unlike existing bridges or cross-chain messaging protocols that often cannot support all chains or scale efficiently, Chain Signatures can support any blockchain without native integration. This includes prominent chains such as Ethereum, Bitcoin, the Cosmos ecosystem, and soon Solana.
Current acceptance and ecosystem
At launch, the Chain Signatures mainnet was already used by five applications, which together have over six million active users. In addition, more than fifteen projects are currently being developed using this technology. The ecosystem of Chain Signatures products is growing rapidly and includes applications that include wallets, decentralized exchanges (DEXs), lending platforms, trading bots, bridges, and more.
Sweat Wallet, for example, allows its 2.5 million active users on NEAR to transfer assets to and from any chain, starting with BNB and Base, while paying for gas in $SWEAT. Allstake has launched Phase 0 on NEAR, Solana, and Ethereum, and supports top Liquid Staking Tokens (LST) and Liquid Reward Tokens (LRT) protocols such as LiNEAR Protocol, MetaPool, Marinade, Jito, Renzo, and EtherFi. HERE Wallet offers support for transactions on any chain through its mobile, web, and Telegram wallet platforms. Please Wallet offers passkey wallets for any chain, including Bitcoin, and facilitates connectivity to all Ethereum apps through WalletConnect. Finally, Defuse acts as a true multichain spot DEX, enabling fast trading between assets on any chain.
Impact on the industry and future prospects
Proximity Labs staff have highlighted the pivotal role of Chain Signatures in addressing interoperability issues in the fragmented Web3 landscape. They have noted that this innovation simplifies the user experience, enables decentralized finance (DeFi) capabilities for blockchains that traditionally do not support smart contracts, and gives developers the ability to support all chains seamlessly. By eliminating the need for bridges, Chain Signatures significantly expands the liquidity and utility of assets across different blockchains, changing the way users and developers interact with decentralized finance and making it more accessible.
A crucial component of the Chain Signatures stack is the Multichain Gas Relayer. This feature alleviates the burden of acquiring separate gas tokens for transactions on different chains by making gas payments on the target chain on behalf of the user. Users only need to pay the corresponding amount in an asset they already own, such as NEAR or other NEAR-native fungible tokens such as USDC or USDT. The combined power of Chain Signatures and gas abstraction provided by the Multichain Gas Relayer provides a streamlined user experience, as exemplified by top dApps such as Sweat Wallet.
The leadership of the NEAR Foundation has hailed Chain Signatures as a groundbreaking innovation that brings Chain Abstraction to life. They have expressed optimism that this development will replace fragmented liquidity in DeFi with a single DeFi layer for all chains. By eliminating the need for multiple wallets, manual bridging, and gas fee payments in different tokens, Chain Signatures makes DeFi accessible from anywhere. This breakthrough is enabled by the ability of smart contracts to sign transactions for any blockchain, even Bitcoin, opening up new design possibilities for financial applications in Web3.
Security and development roadmap
The Chain Signatures mainnet is secured by eight reputable validators, including Pagoda, Luganodes, The Lifted Initiative, InfStones, Staking4All, Node.Monster, Black Sand Technologies, and Aurora. The first audit of the Chain Signatures protocol was conducted by Kudelski, with the final report set to be published on the Chain Signatures GitHub shortly.
Looking ahead, the Chain Signatures development plan includes adding support for EDDSA’s elliptic curve before the end of the year, expanding compatibility with chains like Solana and TON. Additionally, the team wants to increase throughput to match NEAR’s sharding capacity, aiming for up to 300 transactions per second. Over time, the number of validators on the network is expected to increase, with the goal of reaching more than 40 highly independent nodes, 27 of which are required for a single signature.
Diploma
With its official mainnet release, Chain Signatures is poised to revolutionize the Web3 landscape by providing a seamless and efficient solution for multichain transactions and dApp development. By simplifying the user experience and empowering developers, Chain Signatures opens up new opportunities for innovation and growth in the decentralized finance ecosystem. As the platform evolves and expands, it is expected to have a significant impact on how users and developers interact with blockchain technology.
