Author: Babywhale, Foresight News
Cosmos, an ecosystem that was selectively overlooked by the market during the bull market, has gained a lot of attention during the bear market phase. Especially after many public chains that have received substantial financing (such as Sei, Berachain, Neutron) are developed based on Cosmos SDK and star projects like dYdX began to turn to the Cosmos ecosystem, the market has started to reconsider the potential of the Cosmos ecosystem.
The Cosmos SDK provides the ability for public chains to customize development and provides scalability solutions, including IBC cross-chain, making many development teams more willing to use existing tools to achieve richer functionality. XION is a new member of the Cosmos family this year. Compared to its “senior brothers and sisters” rooted in Web3, XION hopes to contribute to the traditional field of “consumption”.
A 180-degree turn for the NFT auction protocol
XION’s development team, Burnt, was originally named Burnt Finance before the brand upgrade and was originally an NFT auction protocol on Solana. It once received a Series A financing of 8 million US dollars led by Animoca Brands. Perhaps influenced by the NFT bear market or other factors, after announcing the brand upgrade to Burnt, Burnt Finance’s strategic direction directly changed from NFT auction to public chain development.
- Perfectly Replicating the Ethereum Ecosystem onto the Bitcoin Network? Exploring the Application Scenarios and Limitations of BitVM
- Conquest.eth Stake to Play mode, a perpetual and permissionless diplomatic strategy game.
- Tencent ShuZang suspends operations, players have no way to protect their rights
Moreover, Burnt has a very distinctive positioning for XION, hoping that its applications can better adapt to the mainstream user habits and achieve large-scale adoption. In this regard, XION plans to add support for USDC on the underlying infrastructure, and Circle Ventures’ strategic investment also demonstrates capital recognition of this idea, but XION’s secret is not just limited to these.
XION’s unique design
XION almost exclusively uses Cosmos’ development toolkit, including CometBFT consensus mechanism, Cosmos SDK, IBC, and CosmWasm. On top of the existing tools, XION’s features include integration with USDC at the infrastructure level, abstraction of technical complexity to facilitate user use, etc.
Native integration of USDC
The integration with USDC is not difficult to understand, and Circle Ventures’ strategic investment may also come with Circle’s technical support. The so-called “integration” by XION essentially provides components that can be directly used for payment with USDC for teams developing applications on the chain, eliminating the need for each project to independently integrate this infrastructure. In addition, XION will convert the fee transactions generated using USDC into the native tokens of the chain priced in USDC and pay them to validators.
It is worth mentioning that in order to further optimize the user experience, XION even stated that it will “eliminate” the use of gas fees in the process of use, and gas fees may be directly included as part of the user’s transaction amount.
To achieve this goal, XION integrates a fee abstraction module built by the Notional DAO team and funded by Osmosis Grants. This module uses Osmosis’ cross-chain transaction functionality, allowing native tokens from other IBC-supported chains to be used to pay gas fees on IBC-supported chains. XION further abstracts this process to make the user experience closer to that of Web2.
“Modular Account Abstraction Layer”
Regarding how to implement “account abstraction,” XION has not provided detailed information at the moment. What is known is that XION will provide developers with modular tools to achieve functions such as credit card payments and Web2 account login. Additionally, XION is integrated with Axelar, enabling developers to connect with chains or projects outside of the Cosmos ecosystem.
In general, when users use applications developed based on XION, they may not need to log in with a Web3 wallet or go through cumbersome gas adjustment and transaction confirmation. They can even directly make payments using credit cards. XION’s vision is to enable users to use Web3 products in a “chain-agnostic” manner, directly targeting the “consumer” group.
What can XION be used for?
When it comes to the application scenarios of XION, theoretically, there are many possibilities. With its native support for USDC, XION can be used as a payment network for many Web3 versions of applications in various daily consumption fields, such as tokenized platforms for tangible assets and travel platforms similar to Travala.com.
There are also countless use cases in the native Web3 field. For example, Burnt’s “core business” NFT auctions or simple sales and transactions can support fiat-based transactions, thus supporting more art-related NFTs. XION can be used to distribute rewards for salary management platforms for DAO members. Platforms like Arkham that provide data analysis can use XION to pay for analyst data mining fees, and so on.
Although XION has ambitious goals, it must be said that the implementation difficulty of this idea may be greater than imagined. On the one hand, integrating stablecoins or even fiat currency payments is not difficult at present, and there are many mature solutions available. On the other hand, the success of XION largely depends on whether widely accepted applications can emerge on the chain. Therefore, XION’s advantages are not obvious, and the development of its ecosystem is particularly crucial.
If we set aside the project itself, from XION, the author sees more imagination in the Cosmos ecosystem. With more and more innovative ecosystem chains joining Cosmos, coupled with the increasing maturity of IBC, asset transfers between chains have become more convenient. In the future, the Cosmos ecosystem may become another important multi-chain interconnected network in the Web3 field, following the widespread EVM ecosystem. Unlike the EVM ecosystem, Cosmos even supports customization of chains for each application according to their needs, relying on cross-chain security to focus more on optimizing applications. Providing network security also increases the value of ATOM, forming a positive cycle.
Like what you're reading? Subscribe to our top stories.
We will continue to update Gambling Chain; if you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us!
