Every day that advances, all the builders are building new projects to take advantage of the capabilities of each blockchain technology and continually evolve to give our users the best experience.
Now we understand more and more the importance of the world being multi-chain, but as builders, are we creating with this new approach?
Single-chain Oriented Development
Just like big projects like SushiSwap, UniSwap, and many more, the user experience should be the first focus (along with the functionality of course). That experience has to be as natural as possible, and the best (if not the only) way to achieve this is to provide a service with as many technical abstractions as possible.
How many times do we see new Defi projects that have a lot of terminology or technical details that are only understood by a few users, especially when they are developed for a particular blockchain?
The development of a particular blockchain has several elements to consider:
- You only limit yourself to a particular customer segment, leaving aside other users who want to participate in your project or see a great alternative for use.
- Transforming a blockchain project into a multi-chain project requires a complete transformation of the project, both at the level of libraries, account and wallet management, and much more.
- If the blockchain project or ecosystem begins to fail, the change will be more abrupt and harsh. Just look at the case of Terra.
Multi-chain Oriented Development
A project should have a Multi-Chain approach from the beginning, even if it is initially developed for a particular chain, so continuous improvement and adding new blockchains will be much simpler.
But how to do it, here are some steps to consider:
- Eliminate any technicalities in the application. Remember that Ethereum users are not the same as Fantom, Avalanche, Polkadot, or others. Everyone can understand different things for the same word.
- Uses the most general technology possible for some functionality. The clearest example is Metamask, which allows you to connect to many strings. But at the same time, let the user decide if that possibility exists. Generalize your system but give the user options to be in control.
- Select at least 2 blockchains with which you can work (even if you select one) to verify that adding more blockchains later will not have a strong cost. For example, if you think your project will use Polygon, plan to integrate Solana or another blockchain without EVM support soon, so you can analyze the development impact.
In addition, in some blockchains you can use libraries such as web3.js, also in certain cases, you must use particular libraries, such as caver.js for Klaytn Blockchain. However, you can also generalize certain processes, for example, if you need to see the details of an account, such as the transactions it has made, the tokens it has, or others.
You can achieve the latter with APIs and services that abstract these complexities, saving you development costs and focusing on what is important: building a great product.
To do this, for example, Quicknode gives you an API to which you can access and obtain data from various blockchains with minimal changes, so you can add or remove certain blockchains in less time than you had planned.
Finally, remember that your project is to give added value to users, the more options you give them, the more chances you have to retain them and keep them using your application.