Chain Abstraction Is Finally Solving Crypto's Worst UX Problem: How NEAR Intents Just Crossed $5 Billion in Volume
In January 2026, something remarkable happened that most crypto users missed: ZORA, a popular Web3 social platform built on Coinbase's Base network, made its token tradable on Solana—not through a bridge, but through a single click. Users holding ZORA on Ethereum's ecosystem could suddenly trade it on Jupiter, Phantom, and Raydium without wrapping tokens, approving multiple transactions, or praying their funds wouldn't get stuck mid-transfer.
The technology enabling this seamless experience is NEAR Intents, which just crossed $5 billion in all-time volume and is processing transactions across 25+ blockchain networks. After years of promises about interoperability, chain abstraction—the idea that users shouldn't need to know or care which blockchain they're using—is finally becoming operational reality.
This matters because multi-chain fragmentation has been crypto's most persistent UX nightmare. In a world of 100+ active blockchains, users have been forced to manage multiple wallets, acquire native gas tokens for each network, navigate clunky bridges that regularly lose funds, and mentally track which assets live where. Chain abstraction promises to make all of that invisible. And in January 2026, we're seeing the first credible evidence that it actually works.
The Problem That Wouldn't Die
Blockchain fragmentation has plagued the industry since the first alternative to Ethereum launched. Every new Layer 1 and Layer 2 that gained traction created another liquidity silo, another wallet to manage, another set of gas tokens to acquire.
Consider what a typical DeFi user faced in 2025: They might hold ETH on Ethereum mainnet, SOL on Solana, USDC on Arbitrum, and stablecoins on Base. Wanting to use a new DeFi protocol on Optimism meant finding a bridge, hoping it supported their specific token pair, paying bridge fees, waiting for finality, and then acquiring OP tokens for gas. The process could take 30 minutes and cost $20-50 in fees and slippage—assuming nothing went wrong.
When things did go wrong, they went spectacularly wrong. Bridge hacks have been responsible for some of crypto's largest losses, with Ronin ($625M), Wormhole ($320M), and Nomad ($190M) representing just the headline incidents. Users who bridged assets to chains that later lost relevance found themselves holding tokens with minimal liquidity and no easy way back.
The result was that most users simply stayed in their ecosystem silos. Ethereum users used Ethereum. Solana users used Solana. The promise of an interconnected multi-chain future remained theoretical.
Enter Intent-Based Architecture
Chain abstraction flips the traditional bridging model. Instead of users specifying exactly how to move assets between chains—which bridge to use, which routes to take, which tokens to approve—intent-based systems let users specify what they want to accomplish. A network of solvers then competes to fulfill that intent in the most efficient way.
NEAR Protocol has emerged as the leading implementation of this approach through NEAR Intents. The system works like this:
- User expresses intent: "I want to swap 1 ETH on Arbitrum for SOL on Solana"
- Solvers compete: Market makers and specialized operators submit bids to fulfill the intent
- Best execution wins: The most efficient solver executes the swap, handling all intermediate steps
- User receives result: SOL arrives in their Solana wallet, as if it were a simple local swap
The technical foundation relies on NEAR's chain signatures technology, which enables smart contracts on NEAR to sign transactions on other blockchains using multi-party computation (MPC) secured by NEAR validators. This means NEAR can coordinate actions across chains without requiring users to interact with each chain individually.
The $5 billion in cumulative volume represents real usage, not testnet experiments. Native wallet providers including Meteor, HOT, Intear, Near Mobile, and Nightly have integrated NEAR Intents functionality, delivering cross-chain capabilities to everyday users.
ZORA and STRK: Chain Abstraction in Action
The week of January 15, 2026 provided two compelling case studies of chain abstraction in production.
ZORA's Solana Expansion: ZORA, which runs a Web3 social platform where posts and creator interactions become tradable tokens, expanded to Solana while keeping its core infrastructure on Base. The ZORA token can now be traded on Jupiter, Phantom, Meteora, and Raydium—Solana's major DEX platforms—without traditional bridging.
This matters because ZORA's model generates new liquidity pools constantly. Every creator coin or popular post creates a new pool. Running this on slower, more expensive networks would be prohibitive. Solana's low fees and high throughput make the economics work. NEAR Intents makes the cross-chain routing invisible to users.
STRK Goes Multi-Chain: On January 15, Starknet's native token STRK went live on Solana through the same NEAR solver infrastructure. Starknet, Ethereum's leading ZK-rollup, previously required users to bridge STRK through traditional mechanisms. Now users can swap into STRK on Solana directly, with the solver network handling the cross-chain execution.
These integrations follow Solana's broader strategy of absorbing liquidity from external networks. Earlier additions included MON and ZEC as non-native assets, positioning Solana as a high-speed trading hub that aggregates assets from across the crypto ecosystem.
The 2026 Infrastructure Roadmap
NEAR's priorities for 2026 make clear that chain abstraction is moving from proof-of-concept to industry infrastructure:
Full MPC Network Scaling: The multi-party computation network that enables chain signatures will expand capacity to handle significantly higher transaction volumes. Current limits have occasionally caused congestion during high-demand periods.
Multichain Execution via TEE: Trusted Execution Environments will provide an additional security layer for cross-chain transactions, particularly important for institutional adoption.
Unified Liquidity Layer: NEAR aims to position Intents as the "unified liquidity layer" for the entire blockchain industry—an ambitious goal that would make NEAR infrastructure as ubiquitous as HTTP for web traffic.
The 2025 achievements provide foundation: Chain signatures reached full generalization, meaning any supported blockchain can participate. NEAR itself hit 1 million transactions per second in testing, demonstrating the throughput capacity for intent settlement at scale.
Competition and Alternatives
NEAR isn't alone in pursuing chain abstraction, though it's currently the most operationally mature.
Particle Network offers a modular Layer 1 built on the Cosmos SDK with Universal Gas (pay fees in any token) and Universal Liquidity (automatic cross-chain fund sourcing). The approach is technically elegant but earlier in adoption than NEAR Intents.
Cosmos IBC remains the most battle-tested cross-chain protocol, with years of production usage connecting the Cosmos ecosystem. However, IBC requires chains to adopt Cosmos-compatible infrastructure, limiting its reach into Ethereum and Solana ecosystems.
LayerZero and Wormhole continue operating as traditional bridge infrastructure with growing intent-like features. They process significant volume but haven't achieved the seamless UX that full chain abstraction promises.
Avail and Similar Projects are building data availability layers that could support chain abstraction, though Avail's co-founder Anurag Arjun has publicly warned that "current chain abstraction techniques create even more fragmentation" when implemented poorly.
The risk of fragmentation is real. If every major ecosystem builds its own chain abstraction solution, users end up with multiple "unified" systems that don't actually unify anything—recreating the original fragmentation problem at a higher layer.
What This Means for Users and Developers
For users, the promise is straightforward: multi-chain crypto that works like single-chain crypto. No more bridge anxiety. No more gas token management across networks. No more tracking which assets are "really" on which chain.
The ZORA integration demonstrates the practical impact. A user can see a ZORA creator token trending, buy it using whatever assets they have in their Phantom wallet, and not think about the fact that the underlying pool lives on Base. That's the experience traditional finance users expect—and that crypto has failed to deliver for a decade.
For developers, chain abstraction changes the calculus of where to build. Instead of committing to one ecosystem and accepting limited reach, applications can deploy on their preferred execution layer while accessing liquidity and users across the multi-chain landscape.
This doesn't eliminate chain-specific considerations entirely. Different networks still offer different tradeoffs for transaction costs, finality speed, developer tooling, and community. But it dramatically reduces the cost of being "on the wrong chain"—because users can access applications regardless of where their assets currently sit.
The Road to Invisible Blockchain
By 2026, wallets and dApps will handle cross-chain complexities invisibly, optimizing for fees, speed, and liquidity. This will foster true interoperability, supercharging growth in RWAs, DeFi, and tokenized ecosystems.
The vision is compelling: users interact with applications, not blockchains. Just as web users don't think about which server hosts a website or which CDN delivers its content, crypto users won't think about which chain executes their transactions. Wallets and applications will route operations to the optimal execution environment automatically.
We're not there yet. NEAR Intents supports roughly 25 chains—impressive but short of the 100+ active networks in the broader ecosystem. Solver competition is still developing, meaning efficiency gains from market dynamics haven't fully materialized. And institutional users, who care deeply about settlement guarantees and legal clarity, remain largely on the sidelines.
But the trajectory is clear. Chain abstraction has moved from conference-talk concept to production infrastructure processing billions in volume. The technical foundations work. The user experience is genuinely improved. What remains is scaling capacity, expanding chain coverage, and building the institutional trust that enables broader adoption.
For an industry that has spent years promising seamless interoperability and delivering bridge hacks, that's meaningful progress. The $5 billion in NEAR Intents volume isn't just a metric—it's evidence that the multi-chain future might actually be usable.
Building applications that need reliable cross-chain data and execution requires robust node infrastructure across multiple networks. BlockEden.xyz provides enterprise-grade RPC endpoints for NEAR, Solana, Ethereum, and 20+ chains with the reliability that multi-chain applications demand. Explore our API marketplace to power your cross-chain infrastructure.