ERC-7683: Building a Borderless Ethereum

We need to end fragmentation before fragmentation ends Ethereum.

Layer 2 solutions have achieved their purpose: to scale the Ethereum network. However, this success brings new challenges—fragmented liquidity and tangled interoperability. These issues are strangling the Ethereum ecosystem, holding it back from its full potential.

It’s time to do something about this.

So we teamed up with Uniswap Labs to develop ERC-7683—a universal standard for crosschain Intents. By standardizing how crosschain Intents are expressed, ERC-7683 lays the foundation for seamless and efficient EVM interop. It is the key to unlocking a truly borderless Ethereum.

Let’s explore the power of universal standards, how ERC-7683 works, and how it sets Ethereum up for a truly cohesive ecosystem.

The explosion of Layer 2 solutions has significantly improved scalability and reduced costs across the Ethereum ecosystem. However, it has simultaneously driven fragmented liquidity and disconnected environments. Simple actions such as transferring assets, executing trades, and participating in governance across chains remain tedious and cumbersome. Users are frustrated by friction-filled crosschain interactions, while developers have to manage multiple deployments and inefficient workflows.

A solution is long overdue. But how should we approach this?

Throughout the history of the internet, universal standards have driven innovation and connectivity by enabling seamless and secure interactions across networks. The Ethereum community alone has proposed over 500 standards, including the revolutionary ERC-20 and ERC-721 token standards, which sparked the explosion of DeFi and NFTs. The key to these standards’ success was their ability to bridge real gaps in user and developer experiences.

Now, it's time to bridge the crosschain gap.

We need a universal standard to unify Ethereum’s multichain ecosystem—to abstract away crosschain complexities from user experiences and provide a shared foundation for building a cohesive ecosystem. By solving the growing fragmentation problem we face today, we can drive record-high levels of innovation and adoption.

Co-developed by Across and Uniswap Labs, ERC-7683 introduces a universal standard for crosschain interop based on Intents. It aims to simplify and unify interactions across EVM chains, laying the foundation for a truly cohesive and interconnected Ethereum ecosystem.

ERC-7683 provides a common framework for developers to build crosschain experiences. It standardizes the expression of Intents—such as token swaps, NFT transfers, and governance votes—across EVM chains. By adopting ERC-7683, developers can build applications that interact seamlessly across EVM chains, providing seamless crosschain experiences for their users.

The standard facilitates the creation of shared filler networks, where participants (Fillers) compete to fulfill crosschain Intents with optimized efficiency and minimized costs. These unified filler networks handle all the interop under the hood, removing the burden from developers and abstracting away the complexities of crosschain transactions from user experiences.

Unified Filler Networks: Builders can leverage shared filler networks to fulfill their users’ crosschain Intents in a robust and secure manner. This setup creates a win-win: Fillers benefit from flexibility, cost savings, and access to more order flow, while applications can route user Intents through a broader and more competitive network. Ultimately, users experience faster fills and lower costs, thanks to the increased capital efficiency Fillers bring to the process.

Enhanced User Experiences: ERC-7683 enables dApps to abstract away crosschain complexities from their user experiences. All the interop executions happen under the hood, freeing users to simply focus on their Intents and enjoy faster, cheaper, and simpler crosschain transactions.

Developer Efficiency: ERC-7683's standardization reduces development costs and speeds up integration processes. Filler networks undertake the burden of fulfilling crosschain transactions, making it easier for developers to implement crosschain features into their dApps. They no longer have to worry about handling the interoperability themselves.

Flexible Settlement: The standard is agnostic to settlement/verification systems, enabling iteration and experimentation that will benefit dApps and users. Projects have the freedom to choose verification methods that fit their needs, encouraging diverse approaches and a resilient ecosystem.

Filler Accessibility: ERC-7683 reduces costs and lowers entry barriers for Fillers, encouraging broader participation. This reinforces less reliance on centralized fillers, creating a more decentralized, inclusive, and resilient Filler ecosystem.

Chain Agnostic Framework: Since the ERC-7683 standard operates at the application level, no changes are required from individual chains to ensure compatibility.

Seamless Crosschain Interactions

Imagine swapping assets from Arbitrum to Polygon, buying NFTs on Optimism with ETH on Mainnet, or staking ETH from any L2 without ever using a bridge. ERC-7683 standardizes the processes in how these results are achieved, eliminating the barriers that make crosschain feel like crosschain.

Unified Governance

ERC-7683 allows dApps to streamline governance across multiple chains. For example, a DAO could easily manage governance proposals across various L2s and sidechains, giving their community broader access to voting processes with no added friction.

Modular Crosschain dApps

ERC-7683 empowers dApps to leverage different chains for specialized functions. Envision a DeFi app that manages transactions on Optimism for speed while securing assets on Ethereum Mainnet for maximum security, seamlessly bridging both networks without any extra steps.

Positioning Ethereum as a Universal Platform

By fostering crosschain interoperability, ERC-7683 strengthens Ethereum’s position as the primary infrastructure for crosschain dApps. Projects may prefer to build on Ethereum over other ecosystems to leverage its standardized crosschain framework, promoting more Ethereum-native innovation and collaboration.

The ERC-7683 campaign is catching massive momentum across the EVM, attracting some of the biggest ecosystems and projects across the entire Ethereum landscape. Below are the projects that have committed to unifying Ethereum with the new standard:

The list is growing—this is only the beginning.

ERC-7683 is more than just a standard: it’s a vision for a truly unified and interoperable Ethereum ecosystem. By connecting chains, ERC-7683 creates a more user-friendly environment for everyone and paves the road for a borderless future.

A new era of crosschain interoperability is upon us. Join us as we embark on this journey, together.

Ready to join the movement?

Contact us here to support the vision for a unified Ethereum.

Dive deeper into ERC-7683 and learn more here.

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