From dApp, roll up, Account Abstruct to Custom Gas Token Chain

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

— Winston Churchill

What we are building is reaching the limit of the state of the art. We experimented with a few innovations of Ethereum L2, Runes and Bitcoin L2, roll ups, and finally we settled down on the Orbit chain with custom gas tokens.

Last year, when we started our project, we were trying to build an infrastructure used for 3D rendering and AI inference on top of L2 of Ethereum. The core of this infrastructure is a bundle of smart contracts driven by an ERC20 token. At that time, we have two options, to run L2 or L3 chain or just dApp with ERC20. At that time, all roll up (or AnyTrust) chains only supported using ETH as the gas token although there is a road map to support the custom gas token. So although we wanted to launch our own L2 or L3 chain for 3D and AI computation and applications we have to hold back the idea and just go with traditional dApp.

Why do we need to have our own chain and even with a custom gas token? Doesn’t that sound not legitimacy? It seems few people really understand this until I read the explanation from here.

Are Orbit chains the same thing as “app chains”?​

It depends on your definition of “app chain”. Orbit chains can be used as application-specific chains (often referred to as “app chains” or “appchains”). But they aren’t just for apps. They’re for hosting EVM-compatible smart contracts using self-managed infrastructure that isolates compute resources away from Arbitrum’s public L2 chains based on your unique needs.

And most importantly, I read it when we conclude that all current Ethereum L2 and Bitcoin L2 do not meet our needs even with account abstract technique. Although account abstract does support paying gas fee with ERC20 token but the issue is it is difficult (if not impossible) to support the application on other blockchains or to decentralize the incentive mechanism issuing new tokens to GPU miners. AI needs the infrastructure that isolates compute resources away from Arbitrum’s public L2 chains. We do not isolate the resources on purpose just because there are no such resources on the public chains. So that is why we need a new chain with a custom gas token and just in time Arbitrum made it production ready four months ago. It took months to notice this big upgrade of the Orbit chain solution but in just two days I have managed to deploy a test chain on Arbirum Nova mainnet.

Some more work needed to finally launch our mainnet as an Orbit chain with a custom gas token. And a summary should be made here. This is not the end of our web3 venture. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.