At Kana Labs, we have the vision of making the Web3 experience as simple, easy and seamless as possible. It starts right from the onboarding into web3 and continues till the end of a transaction or the end of an interaction of the user with the Web3 platform.
When we started our blockchain journey at the beginning of 2016, it was an entirely new domain for everyone. We had to figure out things on the go, Ethereum was the only programmable blockchain available and even that used to go down 16 hours a day. If this happens today, there would be no one in the blockchain.
But we believe that decentralisation is the future and so is open source code. We believe in this concept so much that some of us refused to use Windows and continued to use the clunky Linux OS 2 decades back, something that was unheard of at that time. It was this motivation of decentralisation that continued to drive us as a team even though the entire journey seemed to be uphill at that point in time.
Though we did not jump into any product development on our own at that time, we continued to experiment with blockchain and continued to advocate the advantages of blockchain to as many developers and founders as we could. Then, slowly, we saw the sprouts of growth as some of the founders asked us whether we could help them with developing blockchain products. We readily agreed and for 5 years, till 2021, we continued to develop projects for other companies and founders. We also maintained a very close relationship with the Ethereum Foundation to be abreast of the industry and also to be on top of innovation. This helped us a lot when we began to think of building our own dapp in 2021.
The Beginning of Kana Labs
After the initial surge in blockchain adoption, born mainly out of the crypto boom, the domain had begun to hit a plateau around 2020. The crypto boom was during the COVID times when people were in their homes and were trying to make some money in their idle time, of which they had a lot. But around late 2020, people started returning to work and so traders and users began to move away from crypto and blockchain as they began to focus on their daily life. Ideally, this loss of attention and users should have been filled by new users coming and adoption picking up but that wasn’t happening. There were many new blockchains coming up but they were not bringing in new users. It was the same set of users just moving from one chain to another looking for the best place to develop their app or to make some money.
It had reached a situation where serious and sincere efforts had to be made to bring in new users from Web2 to Web3. So, at Kana Labs, we sat down and analysed the pain points which prevented new users from coming in from Web2 to Web3. We analysed this in 2 ways:
- How to make the experience of using the existing dapps simpler and easier so that new users from web2 can immediately onboard and use them?
- What are the new domains, the low-hanging fruit, that can bring in millions of users from web2 to web3?
Making Existing Dapps User Friendly
Around 2020, there were around 30 chains in use and many more under development. Each of these chains had 100s of applications built on them. Some were very similar across multiple chains while others were way different though they were doing the same functions. This was especially true in DeFi where most of the platforms across chains were either swapping or lending or staking but the UX in each of them was so very different. Right from connecting the wallet to performing the operation, it was very different and difficult even for existing users.
The other problem with having such multiple platforms across multiple chains was that the liquidity was locked into specific chains. Ethereum users were stuck on Ethereum, Solana on Solana and so on. Even if they wanted to move their assets across, it wasn’t very easy. Nor was it cheap. There were a few bridges which helped to move assets across chains but they were not very efficient. They were either very slow or very costly or very unsafe. The user had to compromise on one of these factors to perform any cross-chain transaction. And the cost of such a transaction would also be easily more than $20 depending on the chains involved. We realised that if this was the challenge that crypto natives faced, it is very likely that new users faced even bigger challenges and this is one of the main reasons why DeFi and blockchain were not attracting new users.
The solution to making Dapps friendly
We strongly felt that if the applications across chains have to be user-friendly, there would be no use making some cosmetic changes on the surface of the dapps. It had to be deeper. So we worked on making the cross-chain experience easier and smoother on the infrastructure side. We built an aggregator on Solana, to begin with, and then built out the aggregator on multiple chains like Aptos and Sui and also made use of existing aggregators on EVMs. This was the first step done with the aim of bringing together liquidity on each chain.
The next step was to make it cross-chain so that the users would be able to move assets across multiple chains in a very efficient manner. For this, we aggregated multiple bridges and protocols like Wormhole, LayerZero, CCTP etc with a routing algorithm that would choose the most efficient cross-chain route in real time. This would lead to huge savings, give added security and reduce the time taken for the transaction. By aggregating liquidity at both the chain and bridge level, we can easily make cross-chain TXs very efficient and by doing this, the user would no longer be stuck on a specific blockchain network as he would know that he can be on any chain and would be able to move his assets to any other chain at any time.
This opens 100s of possibilities in payments, trading, yield generation etc. Imagine a situation where a user with a Solana wallet needs to pay someone with an Ethereum wallet. Enabling efficient cross-chain TXs would make this entire pay easy and smooth, unlike now when the users have to do a lot of hard work and spend time, money and effort to move just $10 across 2 chains.
Now with this solid infra layer in place, it is time to build apps on top of this. We have built a cross-chain swap and we plan to build cross-chain staking as well, across both EVMs and non-EVMs. We are proud to say that we were the first team to perform a cross-chain swap between a non-EVM (Aptos) and EVM (Ethereum). We also provide SDKs as the vision of making web3 simpler should not be limited just to us but to our partner platforms as well.
With the infra layer complete, it was time to focus on the application layer and solve the problem of difficult UI and UX for users, both new and old. Having worked with the Ethereum Foundation, we were early on to the concept of Account Abstraction and our CTO contributed to the establishment of the framework. We strongly believe that Account Abstraction would be the key to unlocking Web3 space to Web2 users and bringing in the next wave of new users into the blockchain industry. We focussed on Account Abstraction and now we have an Account Abstraction based wallet with a variety of features such as social login, gasless TXs and sponsored TXs, and multi-chain authentication across 18 chains, including EVMs and non-EVMs as well. This will be used to bring in a smooth and seamless application layer on top of the cross-chain layer not just for Kana Labs but for others as well.
With these 2 achieved, we believe that we have now solved the conundrum for the time being. But as a team, Kana Labs always believes in being on top of innovation and that is why we continue to develop new products to make the experience of web3 easy and fun.
The Next Domain to Bring in Millions of Users to Web3 — Gaming
Many question the focus of Kana Labs on gaming and how gaming can travel along with our DeFi. As explained earlier, our vision is to bring in millions of users into web3 and we strongly believe that gaming is the next best domain that is capable of doing that. Though blockchain gaming became a thing last year, the euphoria died down as the focus on tokens was not the right model. But this year, we are seeing a surge in blockchain gaming and NFTs and we believe that by using our cross-chain infra layer and also our AA framework, we would be able to help games bring in 1000s of gamers from web2 to web3.
The plan is to make the blockchain games similar to a normal web2 games by abstracting away all the web3 functionality, like chains/gas fees/tokens etc and still retain its fun aspect so that blockchain gaming is as attractive as possible. This aligns with our overall vision and the existing tools at the disposal of Kana Labs would be enough for us to help gaming platforms make a grand entry into web3 without having to worry about losing gamers from their games. Kana Labs would ensure that the transition from web2 to web3 for gamers would be as simple and easy as possible and once that is achieved, web2 gamers would come into web3 without even realising it and would then stick around for the benefits that web3 provides.
What the Future Holds for Kana Labs
Kana Labs always strives to stay on top of innovation. Anything that can be done to make web3 easy for users, you can be assured that Kana Labs would be already working on it. Kana Labs has around 50% of its planned products live at the moment. It will also launch trading, staking and work with gaming platforms and other dapps to make onboarding and their UX as easy for users as possible. Already Kana Labs works with multiple chains and platforms all across the world to make this happen.
Q4 2023 — Introduce efficient cross-chain swaps across 9 chains and launch trading. Work with multiple partners to offer them SDK to bring in a similar UX for them as well.
Q1 2024 — work with gaming partners to build a gaming launcher and a massive gaming community to improve traction and make it fun for platforms and gamers to work with Kana Labs
Q2 2024 — Expand into more chains, both EVMs and non-EVMs, while continuing to ensure that new users are onboarded by smooth UX
