Particle.Network

The Bitcoin ecosystem has entered an accelerated growth and evolution phase.

Many consider that 2023 and 2024 will be remembered as the years of bleeding-edge Web3 innovation arrived at Bitcoin. Amongst this revolution, a growing ecosystem of EVM-compatible L2s, Ordinals, BRC-20 tokens, and new dApps has sparked. However, despite abundant solutions addressing the chain’s scalability/cross-compatibility issues, one key area is left needing improvement: user experience (UX).

As Bitcoin’s value proposition continues to stand the test of time, its expanding ecosystem faces the sudden need for simplified user interactions across Bitcoin L1 and its EVM-compatible Layer-2 counterparts. The solution to this requires abstracting away the complexities associated with users’ interactions throughout the ecosystem –a problem tackled by account abstraction (AA) in EVM blockchains.

To this end, we recently introduced BTC Connect, the first-ever account abstraction protocol for the Bitcoin ecosystem and the first breakthrough towards chain abstraction encompassing Bitcoin. In this article, we’ll discuss BTC Connect’s impact, its rationale, its user flow, and chain abstraction as a whole.

What is chain abstraction, and what does it have to do with Bitcoin?

Web3 is a complex labyrinth to navigate. This is especially true for newer users, since to comfortably interact with Web3, they must first understand how to deal with:

• Multiple Layer-1 and Layer-2 blockchains.
• dApps hosted only on specific chains.
• Bridges and cross-chain solutions.
• Fragmented liquidity.

These, among other problems, cause even the most alluring applications, solving real problems, to struggle to drive adoption.

Chain abstraction, as you probably guessed, refers to creating and automating solutions that turn interactions across chains into mere infrastructure details, rather than forcing users to manually navigate through them. This, in turn, enables Web3 applications and solutions to focus on achieving users’ goals rather than constantly facing the friction of interacting across blockchains.

At Particle Network, our goal is to create chain abstraction infrastructure and build it in an intrinsically modular way, giving developers and projects the option of integrating whichever of its components are useful to their specific application.

Bitcoin, as the first, largest, and most valuable blockchain in Web3, becomes an obvious candidate for chain abstraction given its inherent differences with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). As such, we’ve made it a priority to build the required infrastructure for chain abstraction encompassing this ecosystem, giving birth to BTC Connect: the premier Bitcoin account abstraction protocol.

Why Bitcoin Account Abstraction?

Since the need for AA on Bitcoin might not be immediately obvious for users primarily focused on the Bitcoin ecosystem (i.e., those only vaguely familiar with the latest trends on the Ethereum and larger Web3 world), let’s quickly go over this.

AA has the main purpose of improving Web3’s UX to make interactions as flexible as possible, allowing developers to simplify user experience –a prerequisite to onboarding a mass market of users to a growing ecosystem of decentralized products. 

In short, AA aims to achieve this by turning users’ wallets into smart contracts, making them intrinsically programmable. This results in greater flexibility upon usage, bringing along a wide array of use cases, such as:

1. Transaction sponsorship: Transactions can be sponsored or paid for by third parties, enabling gasless user activity.
2. Multi-signature transactions and advanced security policies: Developers can set up complex systems requiring multiple signatures or complex conditions for specific interactions. This enhances security for sensitive operations such as corporate treasury management or decentralized governance operations, also allowing general users to set up 2FA, guardians, and other dynamics for their wallets.
3. Transaction automation: With programmable accounts, users can authorize recurring transactions to be automatically executed, streamlining different on-chain services, such as subscriptions.
4. Delegated transactions: Users can delegate certain types of transactions to eliminate manual signatures, allowing for more immersive experiences in SocialFi, gaming, etc.
5. In advanced applications, privacy, and cross-compatibility options.

The above is not an exhaustive list. These are just a few use cases made possible by AA, a novel field where innovation can still blossom into new, exciting possibilities.

At this point, you may think that, while this is all fine, it’s impossible to turn wallets into smart contracts on Bitcoin without fundamentally altering the blockchain. While you’d be right, you’d be surprised to hear that neither of these happened in Ethereum. Account Abstraction was formalized in the EVM ecosystem through ERC-4337, a proposal that standardized an intrinsically modular, standard set of contracts to achieve AA without making direct changes to the Ethereum network.

With BTC Connect, we’ve created an ingenious design that leverages the dynamics made possible by ERC-4337 on the BTC ecosystem by tapping into EVM-compatible BTC L2s. Let’s now dive into its specifics.