If you raised your eyebrows reading the above title, thinking that the author may be a confused historian straight from the Middle Ages, who accidentally tumbled down the rabbit hole of the blockchain technologies, then you are mistaken.
I'll be also announcing more topics covering blockchain tech as well as crypto & stock market from the cognitive and behavioural economics perspective on my X / Twitter account. For now, let's dive into the topic at hand.
Back to the Middle Ages
Before I’m going to sketch a proposed key blockchain solution by Across and Uniswap, let my illustrate the fundamental problem by way of analogy by going back hundreds of years.
It may come as a surprise to you, living comfortably in the 21st century, but in the Middle Ages in Europe there was no unified standard for measuring length, currency or weight.
For example, in the Baden region, which today is a part of Germany, there were over 100 methods of measurement for length alone. Each town, village or even an individual landowner might have had a unique system, often tied to local landmarks or parts of the body. This led to an immense confusion and inefficiency in trade, in construction, in wasted time, hence made the everyday life much harder than it had to be. Just imagine a carpenter trying to build a house with lumber measured in different units across different suppliers. The lack of standardization made such tasks incredibly complex and prone to errors.
In medieval England, the lack of common currency was a significant obstacle to commerce. Different regions or individual mints produced coins of varying weight, purity, and value. This was a common cause of disputes but also of economic inefficiency. For instance, a silver penny minted in one region might be worth more or less than a penny minted somewhere else. This variability made it difficult for merchants to calculate prices and exchange rates, often leading to losses and quarrels.
In the Byzantine Empire, there were various key units for weight, such as the litra, the mina, and the talent. These units could vary in size and value depending on the specific region. Merchants had to deal with different units of weight used in various regions, so they often had to rely on local experts to convert between different systems. Such a complexity unnecessarily magnified costs and risks in trade, thus hindering economic growth and further development.
To put it succinctly, no uniform standards across the board were assumed or created in the European Middle Ages and this fragmentation of various units with respect to human activity had a negative impact on progress.
But how does the travails of the people from the times long past relate to the cutting edge of the blockchain technologies?
Terraforming on-chain interactions with intents
I’m not going to dive deep into the technical specification – I just want to drive home the key point that establishing a paradigm based on a universal, agreed upon standard of intent based framework for many, if not all, chains is going to transform Web3 and make it a space where everyone, not only the tech-savvy technologists and computer scientists, could find themselves at home.
You may have heard about, or even used the Across and Uniswap DEXs (DEcentralised eXchanges). These two Ethereum based protocols have recently entered and established a cooperation to solve the problem of standardisation – just like in the Middle Age in Europe – which has been ongoing for the last decade in the Web3 universe.
Similarily to the agreed upon universal of physical units, universal currency for people to transact within the borders of the state, or universal container sizes and container ships, that significantly reduced shipping costs and facilitated the global exchange of goods, Across and Uniswap recognised that the fragmented blockchain landscape needs a universal standard to unify, if possible all Ethereum chains.
The new standard, called ERC-7683, aims to ameliorate this persisting fragmentation of (semi to fully incompatible) chains in the whole ecosystem of Ethereum chains. The backbone of the standard are the so-called intents that enable the users to navigate along various Ethereum chains, as if it was a one-stop shop with a simple, so-called "1-click intents", or specified by the user intended actions, allowing to carry out transactions on the chain with ease equal to throwing a store bought frozen pizza into an oven, thus avoiding the whole rigmarole of making one from scratch. In other words, getting ingredients, mixing them up and throwing that pizza into an oven will become abstracted away.
All of the above is soon going to be buried beneath, in the vast Github repositories of artfully orchestrated code but you, as a user, won’t have to worry one bit about any details of how to do the stuff you intend to do – just express your intended outcome – “I want pizza, I don’t care how it’s done!” – by taking action with one click in a browser or an dApp and let the magic happen. No more Middle Ages.
It gets even better
The corollary of introduction of the ERC-7683 standard are the all important network effects. For instance, these occur when the value of a product or service increases (often exponentially) as more and more users adopt it. For example, a payment network Visa became more valuable as more merchants and consumers joined, as it enabled more transactions and reduced the cost per transaction.
For the Web3 users, benefiting from the new standard, the network effects benefits can be divided into direct and indirect. The direct ones mean that the users of the ERC-7683 standard can efficaciously communicate they intents across Web3, on the assumption all dApps and services rely on the same UX and execution, making it unnecessary to learn and relearn new approaches, interfaces or tools – basically, the learning curve stays flat. The indirect ones come from the fact that the more users adopt a technology, the more likely is the technology to become developed and continuously used, thus possibly becoming the de-facto standard of the internet.
Final thoughts
In summary, the true essence of the ERC-7683 standard is to become, the way English has become in the 20th and 21st centuries the dominant lingua franca of commerce and science, the native language of Web3 and how we interact with dApps and services in the blockchain universe. That is, with confidence and no effort of asking around or googling stuff up. No more jotting down the best routes to get your tokens go from A to B on a napkin, no more sighs the liquidity on the favourite DEX has disappeared, no me wasted time that could’ve otherwise been spent with the family watching a favourite show on Neftlix.
For the curious minds, below is a bullet list of key benefits of the ERC-7683 standardisation, even though you already know what they whole shebang is all about. The blockchain users stand to benefit from the following:
- Frictionless transactions: You’ll be able to easily transfer your assets between different blockchains without tying yourself in a knot of jumping from one chain to the next one,
- Better interoperability: the more blockchains can work in unison, the easier for decentralized applications to talk to one another,
- Improved user experience: simplified, faster, cheaper – basically, intuitive. Enough said.
- Boosted Liquidity: dApps will have access to shared filler networks across chains which will offer better liquidity,
- Sped Up Processing of Transactions: lower failure rates and higher speeds of transaction times due to competition among the fillers.
Resources and Further Reading
If you’d like to learn more about the ERC-7683 standard in detail, you can do that at:
https://docs.across.to/concepts/what-are-cross-chain-intents
