I have a friend. He is not an Engineer. He wants to build his business solution (BeeWire) as a dApp that has the business logic in a smart contract. It’s a Web2.5 dApp so, from the user perspective, it abstracts all complexities of Web3 e.g. users signup with email and under-the-hood the dApp handles all the account/key creation, etc. so that it is a seamless experience for Web2 folks. Additionally, native crypto users also have the option to connect their wallets so the dApp from the wallet-perspective should be what is now being popularly referred to as “chain agnostic” and therefore compatible with wallets from the top chains in the crypto ecosystem e.g. Solana, Ethereum, Polkadot, etc. - sounds like a no-brainer right?
How do we not have this yet?
Options he sees are:
I do not like how NEAR is solving this. Their “chain abstraction” solution pigeonholes the developer into NEAR. If they build with chain abstraction they will be stuck in NEAR protocol - I do not think that is the way. But it is clear that NEAR understands that this is a need.
So this is about building chain agnostic dApps (from the user’s perspective).
Most dApps will handle payments. His argument is that if a user has their USDT in their Solana wallet and another user has USDT in a Polkadot wallet, the dApp should be able to handle that under-the-hood.
I was a bit embarrassed to say that we, Polkadot, do not have a solution for this. We can build stuff that is 10 steps ahead of other ecosystems but lack in terms of product.
I want to sell him (and all dApp developers) to build on Polkadot because it is the best platform for building true Web3 solutions on. However, I cannot sell that if we do not have the basic building block: compatible with at least Solana, Ethereum, and a few other highest liquidity chains’ wallets.
Imagine if I were building Instagram and I said that only a sub-set of a sub-set of people can use it. Crypto is, currently, the space where the underlying tech binds/discriminates the user. Imagine if in Web2, depending if I were to use MySQL or MongoDB, I would limit my iOS app’s audience.
Flow would be:
Signup with email → under-the-hood an API creates a DID or root account → user has option to fund that account or connect an already existing account from Polkadot, Ethereum, Solana, etc where they already have USDT on.
Trustless option to transfer between these protocols.
An API.
cc: Apillon