Diversity

This is what it looks like to batch an approve+swap using EIP-7702 on @EkuboProtocol via @MetaMask:

I have been building in crypto for 4 years, here is what I have learned about building Multichain: As Curvance creeps up towards launch, and we start our radical transparency campaign, I think it makes sense to start writing more on X about the lessons we have learned, the opinions we have, and the opportunities we see. I want to start off talking about building multichain and why you likely should not do it. This will be primarily directed towards other application developers who are considering where to deploy or those curious about what it currently feels like to build in DeFi and the decisions that need to be made. To state the obvious, it is quite weird that I recommend AGAINST building on multiple chains at once when we are doing just that. Over the last 2.5 years 6 months or more of development time has been spent specifically not having things blow up by connecting multiple chains. Building meaningful relationships with ecosystem partners is more difficult as supporting applications on every chain integration multiplies the work necessary to hit critical mass very quickly (as it increases the work of development, marketing, and business development). This is thinking from the perspective of adding value to every ecosystem you touch versus being "multi-grant" that we saw last cycle of applications hoping from chain to chain trying to vacuum up incentives, which really is only value extractive, and not sustainable, eventually you piss everyone off. 1) The benefits of building on one chain: Ecosystem Development teams LOVE native projects and, in many cases, do a fantastic end to end job helping applications go to market. From fundraising, to marketing, to product feedback, and beyond. In particular: Monad, Berachain, and Movement have done a fantastic job on this front. Monad has run some of the coolest events such as Monad Madness and The Foundry, and it is an awesome experience to have such a diehard community behind you, providing support. Berachain is fantastic about product feedback and have constantly focused on providing back to the applications building on their chain through programs like RFA, and Proof of Liquidity itself. Movement has helped ecosystem applications raise more capital in aggregate than they themselves have raised, and have supported builders through Battle of Olympus. 2) The difficulty of multichain: Everyone loves the narrative of chain abstraction: Unifying liquidity, users, and reducing the barrier for onboarding new users outside crypto. The reality is that users generally have a "favorite chain" and there is very little you can do to get them to move. For builders, having an application that communicates or manages data across multiple blockchains creates issues around data staleness (what happens if your message takes too long to deliver and the data is no longer relevant?), block reorganization (Do you recreate double spend opportunities if one chain reorganizes during your operations?), liquidity fragmentation (Applications tend to have to collect governance tokens on a chain to build liquidity on AMMs/other venues, what happens when you want liquidity elsewhere and can't use those tokens?). These of course are all problems we are trying to solve for, but remains to be seen how successful we will be. 3) Your addressable market is not as big as you think: If you pull up Defillama and look at the TVL on incumbent chains and applications, you will see that liquidity moves very slowly, and in the late stages of a protocol’s life cycle, usage tends to bleed down, but never hits zero. I call these "dead deposits", you might think that money may move from Compound v2 or Maker DAO if you create "better" opportunities or technology, but the reality is, a lot of that liquidity is never moving. It could be lost wallet keys, it could be people that are happy to forget those assets after borrowing as much as they can against them, or they could have simply forgotten they have assets there. So, in a lot of cases your opportunity for building a killer application and vacuum up all your competitors TVL is a lot smaller than it looks. The hot ball of fast-moving liquidity is noticeably smaller than total DeFi deposits, though I am quite confident we see continued DeFi growth this cycle as we have seen protocols like Aave hit ATH deposits (shout-out to the Aave team those guys are an incredible team). 4: The future looks bright: While this post can be viewed as pessimistic in some ways, it is hard to describe how exciting it is to be building a crypto application right now with so many great destinations to consider. While I think long term, we see crosschain applications become the norm in the same way that a web2 application will build support for Windows, Mac, and Linux, right now picking the right ecosystem to build with and going all in on them is a great strategy. I hope this writeup is useful to someone out there who is deep in thought of where to build or what community they would like to be a part of. The future of building in Crypto is bright with governments around the world starting to look at blockchain technology and mass onboarding events like we have seen with Solana recently. If you have ever been looking for an excuse to start working on the project you have been thinking about, take this as that push. Come and build cool stuff with us, whether that be on any of the chains I mentioned above, or Ethereum, or L2s, or anywhere else. Stay Floppy