In this series of article, I will discuss some interesting De-fi and wallet application on blockchains from a user perspective. I will also discuss some of the technology aspect but as I am not involved in the projects, some of the information is my best guess and please always refer to project’s white paper and documents. Also, this is my personal opinion and not a financial advice.

In June 2024, Particle Network has raised $25M funding for their project and since then I have heard their name in many news and articles.

https://blog.particle.network/25-million-funding/

The punchline of their project is “The L1 Unifying all chains through universal account”. They are promoting the use of ERC-4337 account abstraction and to achieve universal liquidity and universal gas with their layer 1 blockchain network (which they called chain abstraction). That is, they want users to have one account to hold the tokens and gas, which can be used across different blockchains.

They have now started the testnet of their network where users are able to get a grims of how it all work out. And when you launch their testnet (they called it Pioneer), they will show you the distribution of wallets that their users own. Okay, this is interesting (and good), with Particle Network, you can use your existing wallet to create the universal account on Particle Network.

This aligns with how I would expect the major wallet players like Metamask will move forward in future. Rather than being a wallet that hold tokens, these major wallet players will become a signer to enable smart contract account to hold tokens and perform transactions.

To sign up onto Particle Network testnet, you will need to login with a EVM wallet. There are some wallets that will receive bonus points. After that, you will be asked for a referral code. You can certainly use my code “KGQZPE” or you can search for invitation code on their Discord too. The remaining steps are binding your Twitter, following the project on Twitter and Discord. After that, you are good to go.

When you login to the Particle Pioneer dashboard, you will find your universal account address. This is the ERC-4337 smart account address for Particle network and it’s the same across different EVM blockchain thanks to create2 opcode. You should also notice that it’s associated with an owner account, which is the owner of the smart account contract. If you open the blockchain scanner and try to find the universal account, it will not show up as a smart contract, yet. This is a feature of ERC-4337, where the AA smart contract will not be deployed until the first transaction is being made on the account.

You can now start earning PARTI points by completing the tasks in the dashboard. There are tasks where you will need to use your universal account to make transaction on L2’s Sepolia testnet. And that’s where you will need to start playing with USDG, which is the universal gas on Particle network.

To top-up the universal gas in Particle Pioneer, you will need Sepolia ETH (or Sepolia Matic on Polygon testnet) on the owner account. You could also choose to fund the Sepolia ETH with an external account that has the balance.

When you submit the transaction, you will notice there will be two transaction hash. The first one is from the funding wallet calling a smart contract to deposit the ETH. The second one is on Particle Network where the USDG is sent to the universal account.

From here, you can see that Particle Network runs a separate blockchain to manage the universal gas - USDG of your universal account.

The next thing you can do is to perform a cross-chain transaction. Prior to that, you will have to deposit some testing token (Sepolia ETH would be an easy option) into the universal account on one of the Sepolia testnet. After that, you can open up the Particle Network wallet, which is on the bottom right hand corner of the page.

You can try to send the token to the universal address on any other L2 Sepolia testnet. You will need to sign the transaction from your owner wallet.

In order to operate any transaction, you will have to have the RPC info in the owner wallet. That is, your owner wallet will need to have the Base Sepolia RPC configured before you can submit the transaction on Base Sepolia.

When the transaction is confirmed, you should immediately see a few things:

1. The Sepolia ETH is taken out from universal account on the source blockchain. It is a ERC-4337 transaction (user ops) and no gas is charged in Sepolia ETH. The transaction appears in the “Internal Transaction” section on the block scanner.

2. The universal account on the source blockchain has become a smart contract account. You should also see an internal transaction for the contract deployment prior to the token transfer transaction.

3. In the destination blockchain, you should see another ERC-4337 transaction that deposit the Sepolia ETH to the universal account.

4. There should be a settlement transaction hash on Particle Network which takes the USDG from the universal account as the gas fee of the above transaction.

Yay!! Our first cross-chain transaction on Particle Network has completed and this is amazing. You can now try to move the Sepolia ETH around and you can see more amazing feature.

One noticeable feature is you can actually move the same token from the universal account on different blockchain. You can click on the route option to see where the token is coming from. I believe this is the universal liquidity that Particle Network is talking about. This is amazing!

IMO, what Particle Network is trying to solve is super amazing. They used the ERC-4337 account abstraction to enable universal gas and universal liquidity. ERC-4337 has a lot of great feature and gas sponsoring/payment master is one of the topic that has not been very well utilised. I think the reason being many of the ERC-4337 projects mainly focus on bundling service, smart contract code and social on-boarding/recovery features. And Particle Network has delivered a solution which I think has solved liquidity fragment issues, especially on L2s and the solution is on-chain, which provides a lot of transparency.

Last week, I have joined the WireX Pay node sale and it took me 5-6 transactions (and a lot of wait for the tokens to be bridged) to be able to use ETH to purchase the node on Polygon. With Particle Network, it should have been reduced to 2-3. Although we love of own our keys and wallets, we used to rely very much on centralised exchange to achieve “universal liquidity”. The fact is there is a lot of limitation on move liquidity across blockchain with those centralised exchange.

There are a few questions I would like to put up for Particle Network to go forward:

1. How is the user experience going to be on Mainnet? It is clever that Particle Network leverage existing wallet as the owner and signer of the universal account. How easy users can use the universal account with dApps (e.g. Uniswap, 1Inch, etc.) would be the key for adoption. Would it be done through WalletConnect? Or would dApps be required to have a separate integration?

2. With growing mainnet adoption, it’s crucial to address potential challenges, especially concerning decentralization. What steps is the project going to take the layer more decentralized?

3. EIP-7702 is coming underway next year and is going to empower gas sponsorship in an EOA account. How will particle network cope with that?

In conclusion, Particle Network shows immense promise, yet it must overcome significant challenges. How do you envision this technology evolving?

In this series of article, I will discuss some interesting De-fi and wallet application on blockchains from a user perspective. I will also discuss some of the technology aspect but as I am not involved in the projects, some of the information is my best guess and please always refer to project’s white paper and documents. Also, this is my personal opinion and not a financial advice.

In June 2024, Particle Network has raised $25M funding for their project and since then I have heard their name in many news and articles.

https://blog.particle.network/25-million-funding/

The punchline of their project is “The L1 Unifying all chains through universal account”. They are promoting the use of ERC-4337 account abstraction and to achieve universal liquidity and universal gas with their layer 1 blockchain network (which they called chain abstraction). That is, they want users to have one account to hold the tokens and gas, which can be used across different blockchains.

They have now started the testnet of their network where users are able to get a grims of how it all work out. And when you launch their testnet (they called it Pioneer), they will show you the distribution of wallets that their users own. Okay, this is interesting (and good), with Particle Network, you can use your existing wallet to create the universal account on Particle Network.

This aligns with how I would expect the major wallet players like Metamask will move forward in future. Rather than being a wallet that hold tokens, these major wallet players will become a signer to enable smart contract account to hold tokens and perform transactions.

To sign up onto Particle Network testnet, you will need to login with a EVM wallet. There are some wallets that will receive bonus points. After that, you will be asked for a referral code. You can certainly use my code “KGQZPE” or you can search for invitation code on their Discord too. The remaining steps are binding your Twitter, following the project on Twitter and Discord. After that, you are good to go.

When you login to the Particle Pioneer dashboard, you will find your universal account address. This is the ERC-4337 smart account address for Particle network and it’s the same across different EVM blockchain thanks to create2 opcode. You should also notice that it’s associated with an owner account, which is the owner of the smart account contract. If you open the blockchain scanner and try to find the universal account, it will not show up as a smart contract, yet. This is a feature of ERC-4337, where the AA smart contract will not be deployed until the first transaction is being made on the account.

You can now start earning PARTI points by completing the tasks in the dashboard. There are tasks where you will need to use your universal account to make transaction on L2’s Sepolia testnet. And that’s where you will need to start playing with USDG, which is the universal gas on Particle network.

To top-up the universal gas in Particle Pioneer, you will need Sepolia ETH (or Sepolia Matic on Polygon testnet) on the owner account. You could also choose to fund the Sepolia ETH with an external account that has the balance.

When you submit the transaction, you will notice there will be two transaction hash. The first one is from the funding wallet calling a smart contract to deposit the ETH. The second one is on Particle Network where the USDG is sent to the universal account.

From here, you can see that Particle Network runs a separate blockchain to manage the universal gas - USDG of your universal account.

The next thing you can do is to perform a cross-chain transaction. Prior to that, you will have to deposit some testing token (Sepolia ETH would be an easy option) into the universal account on one of the Sepolia testnet. After that, you can open up the Particle Network wallet, which is on the bottom right hand corner of the page.

You can try to send the token to the universal address on any other L2 Sepolia testnet. You will need to sign the transaction from your owner wallet.

In order to operate any transaction, you will have to have the RPC info in the owner wallet. That is, your owner wallet will need to have the Base Sepolia RPC configured before you can submit the transaction on Base Sepolia.

When the transaction is confirmed, you should immediately see a few things:

1. The Sepolia ETH is taken out from universal account on the source blockchain. It is a ERC-4337 transaction (user ops) and no gas is charged in Sepolia ETH. The transaction appears in the “Internal Transaction” section on the block scanner.

2. The universal account on the source blockchain has become a smart contract account. You should also see an internal transaction for the contract deployment prior to the token transfer transaction.

3. In the destination blockchain, you should see another ERC-4337 transaction that deposit the Sepolia ETH to the universal account.

4. There should be a settlement transaction hash on Particle Network which takes the USDG from the universal account as the gas fee of the above transaction.

Yay!! Our first cross-chain transaction on Particle Network has completed and this is amazing. You can now try to move the Sepolia ETH around and you can see more amazing feature.

One noticeable feature is you can actually move the same token from the universal account on different blockchain. You can click on the route option to see where the token is coming from. I believe this is the universal liquidity that Particle Network is talking about. This is amazing!

IMO, what Particle Network is trying to solve is super amazing. They used the ERC-4337 account abstraction to enable universal gas and universal liquidity. ERC-4337 has a lot of great feature and gas sponsoring/payment master is one of the topic that has not been very well utilised. I think the reason being many of the ERC-4337 projects mainly focus on bundling service, smart contract code and social on-boarding/recovery features. And Particle Network has delivered a solution which I think has solved liquidity fragment issues, especially on L2s and the solution is on-chain, which provides a lot of transparency.

Last week, I have joined the WireX Pay node sale and it took me 5-6 transactions (and a lot of wait for the tokens to be bridged) to be able to use ETH to purchase the node on Polygon. With Particle Network, it should have been reduced to 2-3. Although we love of own our keys and wallets, we used to rely very much on centralised exchange to achieve “universal liquidity”. The fact is there is a lot of limitation on move liquidity across blockchain with those centralised exchange.

There are a few questions I would like to put up for Particle Network to go forward:

1. How is the user experience going to be on Mainnet? It is clever that Particle Network leverage existing wallet as the owner and signer of the universal account. How easy users can use the universal account with dApps (e.g. Uniswap, 1Inch, etc.) would be the key for adoption. Would it be done through WalletConnect? Or would dApps be required to have a separate integration?

2. With growing mainnet adoption, it’s crucial to address potential challenges, especially concerning decentralization. What steps is the project going to take the layer more decentralized?

3. EIP-7702 is coming underway next year and is going to empower gas sponsorship in an EOA account. How will particle network cope with that?

In conclusion, Particle Network shows immense promise, yet it must overcome significant challenges. How do you envision this technology evolving?