CAKE Working Group

Ethereum and the broader web3 ecosystem are moving fast towards a multi-chain future. Ethereum, having chosen a rollup centric approach to scaling already boasts more than 50 rollups in production and rollup as a service tools making it trivial to launch application specific rollups. More and more users are interacting with apps on multiple chains and are looking for a seamless way to perform actions across multiple execution environments. However, the user experience of the multi-chain world is mediocre at best with users needing to understand an array of complex technologies such as key, wallets, bridges, RPCs, gas and more.

Frontier Research has put together a framework called Chain Abstraction Key Elements (”CAKE framework”) to help developers think through the requirements of providing a good user experience consistent with the Chain Abstraction philosophy.

There have been several independent efforts to develop and introduce standards which would improve interoperability, developer experience, and user experience. These include Account Abstraction (EIP-4337), Smart Wallets (ERC-7579, ERC-7555 ERC-6900), Intents (ERC-7521), Cross-chain (xERC20).

Although each of these efforts are worthwhile in their own right, we believe researchers and developers alike would benefit from forming a shared perspective of interaction across the stack and a consensus view on the requirements for message passing standardization between components.

As such, we are introducing the Chain Abstraction Working Group to host discussions and workshops regarding research and standardization across all slices of the CAKE.

Hosted a one day conference at ETHDenver on Feb 28th to deep dive into the CAKE framework with teams building across all the slices.

Hosted initial round table workshops at ETHDenver on Feb 29th and ETHLondon on Friday, March 15 to put the icing on the cake.