What is Particle Network? Airdrop Opportunity ($PARTI)
What is Particle Network?
Overview of Particle Network's technology and products
Particle Network: The Modular L1 Powering Chain Abstraction
Particle Network's goal is to abstract away the complexities associated with user onboarding and interactions across the multi-chain ecosystem, paving the way for mass Web3 adoption.
Launched in 2022, Particle Network debuted as a Wallet Abstraction service provider, enabling users to create wallets linked to their Web2 social accounts, which can then be used natively within dApp-embedded interfaces. After more than 17 Million wallet activations, and over 900 dApp integrations later, Particle is taking the next step in its evolution by debuting its Modular L1 powering chain abstraction.
This page will give you a quick overview of our live and upcoming products, as well as the technology supporting them.
Modular L1
Particle Network's modular L1 blockchain powers chain abstraction and coordinates Universal Accounts across chains, abstracting away wallets, gas, and unifying liquidity. It acts as a universal settlement layer, empowering existing L1s, L2s, and non-EVM blockchains through account coordination.
Relying on the Cosmos SDK to build this L1 allows us to make it intrinsically modular, retaining its sovereignty while outsourcing key functions like validation and data availability to specialized ecosystem actors. It also allows us to leverage Cosmos' Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol for interoperability, enabling cheap, fast cross-chain transaction execution. Our L1 is also based on Rollkit and uses Berachain's Polaris framework for EVM compatibility.
The Particle Chain relies on three core modules, each creating a unique user advantage:
- Universal Accounts: These are custom ERC-4337 smart account implementations that offer a single user address and balance across ecosystems. With these Accounts, Particle Network proposes a new UserOperation structure, simplifying the management and usage of Smart Contract Wallets on all EVM chains and allowing them to control accounts on heterogeneous blockchains like Bitcoin and Solana.
- Universal Liquidity: Unifies the liquidity of all chains through the optimistic execution of multi-chain atomic transactions. This allows users to interact with new chains without holding tokens on them.
- Universal Gas Token: Allows users to pay gas for cross-chain transactions with a Universal Gas Token, as opposed to the multi-chain ecosystem’s need for multiple gas units (SOL, ETH, MATIC, etc.)
Key functionalities and initial ecosystem
The following functionalities are made possible by Particle Network’s modular L1:
- Master Keystore Hub: Particle Network acts as the central hub coordinating smart contract deployments and updates across all networks, automatically synchronizing settings between each Universal Account instance and ensuring complete state parity across networks.
- Decentralized Messaging Network (DMN): We implement a solution for the verification and relaying of cross-chain messages. Within it, we leverage LayerZero's v2 design via an optimized DVN, alongside Hyperlane with a custom ISM. We also rely on IBC and Across for deeper interoperability.
- Decentralized Bundler: Particle Network has designed and implemented a fully censorship-resistant, decentralized Bundler for high-volume UserOperation processing. The Bundler takes transactions from a public UserOp mempool to be processed by Operators participating in Particle Network’s custom Bundler AVS before relaying them.
Design and security
The Particle Network modular L1 features a dual staking system, combining Proof-of-Stake through Tendermint with Ethereum’s native security and censorship resistance, facilitated by EigenLayer’s restaking.
Furthermore, it presents a unique data availability aggregation (AggDA) model relying on providers like NEAR DA, Celestia, EigenDA, and Avail.
Our L1's modular architecture.
Furthermore, Particle Network’s architecture allows the Smart Accounts resulting from its existing Wallet Abstraction solutions (see below) to seamlessly onboard into this new L1, becoming Universal Accounts. This will instantly allow them to settle and coordinate cross-chain operations on our network, also bootstrapping the chain’s initial ecosystem and traction.
Particle Network's modular L1's Testnet is projected to be released in Q1 2024, with its Mainnet released in Q2. For a soft roadmap and more technical details, visit its dedicated page: (Modular L1).
Wallet Abstraction solutions
Prior to the release of our Modular L1, Particle's Wallet Abstraction stack comprises two main products, both of which are used by over 4M daily users across 56 chains. These are:
Modular Smart Wallet-as-a-Service
Particle's Modular Smart Wallet-as-a-Service (WaaS) stack allows developers to tap into MPC-TSS and social logins to enable self-custodial, dApp-embedded wallets. It also empowers them to leverage the potential of ERC-4337 account abstraction, enabling a seamless, flexible experience.
In short, Modular Smart WaaS allows developers and users to interact natively with AA while directly tied to an MPC-secured account generated by Particle. This fulfills the following critical points:
- Seamless onboarding via WaaS & non-custodial key management: Particle’s existing implementation of WaaS features advanced MPC-TSS private key management. Combined with social authentication, this ensures that end users can be swiftly and securely onboarded –regardless of their level of familiarity– into Web3.
- Leveraging AA’s flexibility without compromising application complexity: This empowers developers to build all kinds of applications, making the most out of AA’s capabilities. Particle’s AA-SDK enables very familiar mechanisms of interacting with smart accounts programmatically –such as familiar transaction structures, building, and account management– all handled seamlessly by the SDK. This results in a short path to start using AA with Particle’s WaaS, simplifying interactions with dApps.
- AA modularity via WaaS: Particle’s AA SDK allows developers to approach AA modularly, plugging into their preferred smart account implementations, Bundlers, Paymasters, etc., with ease. As a WaaS provider, Particle can also be plugged into any initial/onboarding point within AA applications as an EOA-based Signer, even if they don’t natively use the AA SDK. As such, even non-native AA applications can leverage Particle’s WaaS for onboarding. This creates a wholly customizable building experience for native and non-native applications alike.
BTC Connect
BTC Connect is the first EVM-compatible ERC-4337 AA protocol for Bitcoin, supported by leading players in the BTC universe.
Particle Network enables account abstraction in the Bitcoin ecosystem by bringing ERC-4337 natively to Bitcoin L2s. Thanks to it, users can enjoy all the UX benefits of AA on Bitcoin without the need for secondary interfaces (such as a MetaMask wallet). This enables them to control a smart account on an EVM-compatible Bitcoin L2 with a "regular" Bitcoin Wallet (such as UniSat, Xverse, Bitget, TokenPocket, etc.) as its Signer. As a result, a user can interact with these networks while holding either only native BTC or no assets at all (if leveraging gasless transactions).
By implementing BTC Connect, developers can offer their users all of the benefits of account abstraction within EVM-compatible Bitcoin L2 chains, including account programmability, gasless interactions, batched transactions, etc.
Realized Vision: Modular Chain Abstraction
Particle Network's road from a Wallet-as-a-Service tool to powering chain abstraction.
Suggest Edits
Particle Network debuted as a Wallet Abstraction tool for developers. Our initial Wallet-as-a-Service (WaaS) stack aimed to leverage MPC-TSS and social logins to enable self-custodial, dApp-embedded wallets. Then, as account abstraction (AA) launched and became a fundamental component of Web3, we saw the opportunity to integrate it into our offering, adapting to upgraded account structures through smart contract wallets. We aimed to offer developers a seamless experience while aiming for maximum flexibility and programmability, and so Modular Smart WaaS was born.
900+ integrations and more than 17 Million activated wallets later, remaining focused on propelling Web3’s growth, we decided to release our Modular L1 to take our solutions to the next level, addressing Web3's largest UX problem: the difficulty of blockchain interactions in a fragmented ecosystem. We envision an ecosystem in which the decentralization, permissionlessness, and digital ownership advantages of Web3 can shine above all constraints. Therefore, we conceptualized our Modular L1 design to make such an ecosystem possible. To this solution, we give the name of chain abstraction.
What is chain abstraction?
The Web3 experience is far from feeling intuitive or universal. Different chains incentivize users to exclusively utilize their network and require different wallets to interact with them. Meanwhile, protocols decide which chain to deploy on by prioritizing co-marketing activities, TVL, and market sentiment, not technology or innovation. This creates siloed and incompatible ecosystems, stunting Web3’s growth and limiting it to technically-aware users.
The solution to this problem is chain abstraction: the simplification of users’ interactions with blockchains, allowing them to use any product and asset without worrying about managing multiple wallets, bridging, underlying blockchains, etc.
A fully chain-abstracted experience can look as follows:
- Alice discovers a Play-to-Earn dApp. The dApp is hosted on Arbitrum.
- Alice starts using the dApp. The assets in her wallet (Polygon-native) are used for basic dApp interactions. Bridging is automatic, executed atomically as she interacts.
- After playing for a bit, Alice earns some tokens. She uses them to buy an NFT for her friend Bob’s birthday. Unbeknownst to her, the NFT is hosted on Optimism. She can seamlessly send it to Bob’s Universal Account. Importantly, throughout her whole experience, Alice has only used a single gas token.Bob decides to take a loan against the NFT on Solana and use the proceeds to buy a meme Bitcoin Ordinal. He does this in just a few clicks within a few minutes, all through the same account..
Particle Network's role in chain abstraction
The Particle Network Modular L1 aims to act as a universal settlement layer across all chains, providing three key services for chain abstraction:
- Wallet Abstraction: Removing the need for multiple wallets and separated balances across chains, creating a single interaction point for the multi-chain ecosystem, called a Universal Account.
- Liquidity Abstraction: Unifies all networks through atomic transactions and automated swaps, allowing users to interact across chains effortlessly.
- Gas Abstraction: Allows users to pay gas for cross-chain transactions with a Universal Gas Token, such as PARTI, USDT, or USDC sourced from any blockchain, as opposed to the multi-chain ecosystem’s need for multiple chain-exclusive gas units (SOL, ETH, MATIC, etc.)
Although these alone represent a great advancement of Web3's goals, they are also built on top of existing products, such as data availability and restaking solutions, as detailed on our L1's dedicated page. In its pursuit of chain abstraction, Particle Network sees itself as a part of a bigger picture, seeking to collaborate closely with other industry players focused on chain abstraction, including NEAR and the CAKE R&D group.
As a guiding principle, we seek to establish standards and build upon existing solutions/infrastructure tackling the same problem, leading Web3 towards an era of unified chain abstraction solutions acting in conjunction for the greater good of the ecosystem. Chain abstraction appears at the chasm of Web3’s growth curve, aiming to become the definitive solution for solving scalability and decentralization and granting users a better experience.
Modular L1
The Particle Network modular L1 powers chain abstraction, acting as a universal settlement layer.
At the center of Particle Network’s tech stack is its modular L1 powering chain abstraction. Built with the Cosmos SDK, this L1 exists to coordinate cross-chain transactions and act as a settlement layer for Universal Accounts. This L1 is composed of three core modules:
Collectively, these components allow for the unification of interactions across all chains, providing users with a single balance and account state, with the Particle Network L1 automatically coordinating and settling the transactions required for such functionality.
Utility and key functionalities
Particle Network serves three main functionalities to fulfill its goal of acting as a settlement layer for the multi-chain ecosystem:
- Master Keystore Hub: Particle Network acts as the central hub coordinating smart contract deployments and updates across all networks, automatically synchronizing settings between each Universal Account instance and ensuring complete state parity across networks. Account settings are stored on Particle Network to be used as a central source of truth across every instance. Our L1 then facilitates cross-chain messages to either deploy new instances abiding by these settings or update existing instances as these settings change.
- Decentralized Messaging Network (DMN): Our L1 implements a specialized solution for verifying and relaying cross-chain messages. This DMN leverages infrastructure from LayerZero's V2 design, operating a security-centric DVN (Decentralized Verifier Network) within Particle Network. This employs customized settings and optimizations to enhance speed, utilizing our own executors to manage cross-chain UserOperation execution and gas fee payments. Our DVN is optimized for high-value transactions in which speed is less important and maximizing security is prioritized. Furthermore, for high-frequency, high-speed transactions, the DMN incorporates Hyperlane and deploys a speed-optimized ISM (Interchain Security Module) leveraging our DMN for optimistic verification. Hyperlane’s permissionless nature also allows us to quickly scale across chains, ensuring consistent coverage of the EVM ecosystem. Complementing the aforementioned solutions, we utilize IBC and Across, allowing us to interconnect the Cosmos ecosystem, Solana, Bitcoin, and other chains. Particle's Decentralized Messaging Network provides a unified messaging channel (characterized as “Universal IBC”) facilitating high-speed, secure cross-chain transactions.
- Decentralized Bundler: While current implementations of ERC-4337 account abstraction Bundlers are centralized and as such censorable, Particle Network has designed and implemented a fully decentralized Bundler for high-volume UserOperation processing. Within this implementation, the Bundler takes transactions from a public UserOp mempool, upon which they’re processed by Operators participating in Particle Network’s custom Bundler AVS before relaying them.
Core Modules
Universal Accounts
Particle Network’s Universal Accounts, powered by its Layer-1, are ERC-4337 smart account implementations that aggregate token balances across all chains through the automatic routing and executing of atomic cross-chain transactions.
These accounts, (which in turn leverage Particle’s Universal Gas Token and Universal Liquidity) can be understood as smart account implementations assigned to an existing EOA derived from either social logins through Particle Network’s Modular Smart Wallet-as-a-Service, or standard Web3 and Bitcoin (through BTC Connect wallets. These account implementations automatically use Particle Network for the facilitation of atomic cross-chain transactions, allowing them to maintain a unified state.
Universal Liquidity
Universal Liquidity, refers to the aggregation of balances across all chains, and is directly driven by atomic cross-chain transactions and swaps coordinated by Particle Network. Various different AMBs, alongside IBC, are used to optimistically execute multi-chain transactions on a per-interaction basis, atomically routing liquidity across chains to achieve a temporary goal.
For example, if a given user has 1 ETH worth of MATIC on Polygon, but is executing a transaction requiring 1 ETH on Optimism, Particle Network will route and execute a cross-chain transaction through the initial signature provided for their intended interaction. This allows value to quickly be moved from Polygon to Optimism and thus used for the action in question, creating the perception of a singular balance spanning all blockchains.
User flow for cross-chain transaction (UserOperation) using Particle Network
Universal Gas Token
Given the unification of balances across chains, Particle Network also solves the fragmentation of expected gas tokens, providing a cohesive experience.
While most networks share a range of standard tokens (such as USDT), every blockchain requires a specific gas token, therefore requiring users to hold a plethora of different tokens across networks. To solve this issue and further enable a truly universal experience, Particle Network is introducing its Universal Gas Token: one token available directly within Universal Accounts to be used for paying gas fees across every chain. Thus, cross-chain transactions only require this specific token for execution, rather than individual tokens for each chain they use. This dynamic further contributes to the underlying goal of chain abstraction and can be accessed even at times when the user doesn’t hold the Universal Gas Token via automated swaps, allowing them to pay for gas using any token.
Architecture
Architecture of the Particle Network's Modular L1
Particle Network's Layer-1 takes a unique and innovative approach to its foundational architecture. This modular L1 compartmentalizes different parts of its infrastructure to enable the outsourcing of tasks (computation, storage, etc.) to third parties. This makes Particle Network infinitely composable, as these specific components, such as Data Availability, remain entirely modular. In particular, Particle Network outsources the following functionalities to such third parties:
Aggregated Data Availability (AggDA)
Within modular blockchain architectures, the most commonly outsourced component is Data Availability (DA). Particle Network is no exception, although it takes a unique approach to the implementation of external DA layers.
Due to the intensive task of coordinating cross-chain transactions across the entire blockchain ecosystem and simultaneously maintaining state across every Universal Account, Particle aims to maximize security and stability to build a truly robust blockchain. In the context of DA, this is achieved through the aggregation of multiple providers. These providers are:
With each DA solution bringing unique benefits and performance priorities, leveraging only one would fail to meet the requirement of maximal security and stability. Therefore, Particle leverages random deterministic redundancy for each block, posting data between different DA layers accordingly. This model significantly enhances availability and stability through increased redundancy, as well as decentralization.
Dual Staking
Following a similar philosophy to AggDA, Particle Network approaches consensus by focusing on ensuring a high degree of cryptoeconomic security and accessibility.
Bootstrapping a Proof-of-Stake network can be risky, often leading to undesirable volatility affecting the network's value and stability. To solve this, Particle Network will use a dual staking model, leveraging both restaked ETH through EigenLayer and its native token (through Tendermint) to secure the network.
Our L1’s dual staking mechanism leverages two distinct pools of operators: one with delegations of Particle Network’s native token, and another with delegations of ETH. Both groups are required to agree on validity individually, warranting equal participation in consensus.
A model of this nature significantly reduces pressure and security dependence on Particle Network's native token, instead bootstrapping the network through the cryptoeconomic security provided by restaked ETH.
Community:
https://twitter.com/ParticleNtwrk
https://discord.com/invite/2y44qr6CR2
https://blog.particle.network/
https://www.youtube.com/@ParticleNtwrk
Resources:
https://docs.particle.network/
AIRDROP
Testnet Address:
https://pioneer.particle.network/
What is the Particle Testnet？
The Particle Testnet is the first rollout phase for Particle Network's modular L1 blockchain. This blockchain powers chain abstraction by enabling users to create Universal Accounts, allowing them to have a single address and interaction point across chains while abstracting gas and unifying liquidity.
What are $PARTI Points?
$PARTI points are rewards for participating in the Particle Testnet and Particle Pioneer program. These points allow users to participate in upcoming airdrops, earn bonuses in the People's Launchpad, and secure whitelist spots for various ecosystems. $PARTI points offer you a unique opportunity to enhance your journey and experience the full potential of chain abstraction powered by Particle Network.
NOTE: The articles written here are for informational purposes only and are not investment advice.
Please, DYOR (Do Your Own Research)!
