From Isolation to Interconnection: How the Full-Chain Application Layer Skate Achieves Full-Chain Deployment of DApps

Recently, the application layer Skate of the entire chain introduced the basic infrastructure for implementing stateless apps in its official latest announcement Skate 101, aiming to build stateless apps deployed across the entire chain in the current era of multi-chain parallelism, addressing the fragmentation and low interoperability of Web3 applications. This innovative technology, through unique design, achieves seamless connection of cross-chain applications, laying the foundation for unleashing new possibilities for future cross-chain applications.

The technological evolution and ecological expansion of Ethereum

Since the introduction of smart contract functionality on Ethereum, it has spawned a large number of innovative decentralized applications (DApps). With the widespread adoption of these applications, network congestion has become increasingly severe, resulting in a sharp rise in transaction costs. In order to address this challenge, new Layer 1 blockchain solutions have emerged. Ethereum itself is also transitioning towards a Rollup-centric approach to address its scalability issues, which has greatly promoted the development of Layer 2 blockchain technology. However, the challenge that comes with it is that each emerging blockchain needs to deploy a full set of basic Web3 applications, and DApps on the market have been deployed on as many as 30 chains.

In the past year 2023, the number of Ethereum Layer 2 solutions has surged, and it is expected that this growth trend will be even more rapid in the future. This rapid growth has driven the development of interoperability protocols that support modular Roll up service models, reducing the deployment time of blockchains to just 5 minutes.

We are rapidly stepping into a future with thousands of active blockchains, which will fundamentally change the landscape of Web3 applications and their interactions.

Interoperability Challenges and Fragmentation Issues

Currently, 90% of the applications in the EVM ecosystem are deployed as forked versions on new chains, which leads to significant resource waste and application fragmentation. Despite the efforts of numerous professional teams in application layer development, the ‘fork everywhere’ pattern still prevails. Different blockchains have different block times, finality, and consensus mechanisms, further increasing the complexity of interoperability protocols.

Currently, applications are generally designed as monolithic applications on a single chain, while interoperability protocols are mainly used for message passing and asset bridging. Interoperability protocols are trying to find the right balance between decentralization and transaction speed to adapt to their specific use case requirements. However, most interoperability protocols still have significant latency in message finality time (ranging from 15 minutes to 7 days), which is also the main reason why seamless interoperability cannot be achieved at the current Web3 application level. Therefore, the existing Web3 application space presents a fragmented and inefficient state.

Reducing interoperability latency to a minimum and achieving seamless application layer interoperability is the top priority problem that needs to be solved in the industry.

How does Skate solve this problem?

Is Skate just another blockchain? Another interoperability protocol? Or chain abstraction technology?

Of course not. Skate has pioneered a new paradigm by addressing this issue at the application level.

skate Cross-Chain Application Innovation Solution: Skating towards the World of ‘Stateless Applications’

Skate proposes to create stateless apps that can interact across chains, allowing any DApp to run simultaneously on thousands of chains through a single state set, unlocking the cross-chain interoperability problem of Web3 applications. Any non-EVM and EVM new chain can easily connect to Skate, and users and developers only need to interact with Skate separately to immediately access thousands of chains at once.

By breaking down the structure of a Web3 application into two basic components: the kernel that maintains its own logic, and the periphery, which is responsible for user interaction, the core part deals with the basic logic and state of the application, while the peripheral part deals with user interaction. Skate’s vision is to separate these two components, and with a single core contract, the application can maintain a single state across all on-chains.

Each blockchain will have a Skate gateway contract, which is the only way for the application core to interact with the periphery. Users interact with applications on different chains through intents, which are quickly pre-confirmed by special executors (such as Allowlist entities), achieving interoperability at the application layer.

Whenever a user generates an output, the application kernel creates a task and sends it to the task box on the on-chain of Skate - the central chain that stores the application state. These tasks will be assigned a task ID and invocation data, and sent to the user-interactive chain through Skate’s pre-confirmation layer AVS, which is secured by the Eigen Layer. The Eigen Layer provides a high degree of economic trust, allowing Skate applications to share a single state across thousands of chains.

Cross-Chain Interaction of Skate’s Expansion

In addition, the Stateless app will adopt a plug-and-play model, using any interoperable protocol such as Axelar or LayerZero for actual finality confirmation and ensuring risk control for pre-confirmation. The task transitions from the pending state in the task box to the pre-confirmation state, and then the call data related to the task is executed through the gateway contract to achieve the expected output in the peripheral components of the application.

This revolutionary innovation enables applications to go live in a single application state across thousands of chains, harnessing network effects of the entire ecosystem. New and upcoming Layer 2 no longer need to build all the necessary applications from scratch. Skate is also developing gateway wrappers for non-EVM chains (such as Solana, SUI, Aptos, and Ton), enabling EVM applications to share application states across EVM and non-EVM chains.