Crypto infrastructure company Sequence—formerly Horizon Blockchain Games– seeks to solve one of crypto’s biggest interoperability problems, by putting an end to user and developer concerns about wallets, tokens, and gas fees for individual blockchains.
On Thursday, the company unveiled Trails, a new transaction orchestration platform designed to enable applications to accept crypto from anyone, anywhere with just one click.
“We have always been an infrastructure company,” says Peter Kieltyka, co-founder of Sequence Declutter. “We just solve whatever problem we need to solve.”
One of the big problems for crypto users and developers in Kieltyka’s eyes is fragmentation, or the disparate silos of tokens, wallet infrastructures, and capabilities that exist when switching between blockchains such as the Ethereum mainnet and its layer 2 scaling networks.
“Ethereum is not one chain,” says Kieltyka. “It is an ecosystem of chains and a network of chains, but there is so much fragmentation that comes from that.”
“You have liquidity everywhere, you have tokens everywhere, you have gas tokens everywhere – the chain fragmentation is really hurting developers and applications’ ability to actually monetize and create a successful business on-chain,” he added.
That’s where Trails comes in, using new “transaction rails” with intent-based interoperability that simplify the transaction experience for developers and users in the chain. Essentially, users tell the app what they want to do, and Trails makes this happen behind the scenes.
For example, Trails allows users to pay for items like NFTs with any token, from any supported chain, without thinking about bridge, exchange, or gas fees. In other words, if a user wants to spend 100 USDC on Arbitrum, but only has the token in their balance on other Ethereum Layer-2 networks, Trails will automatically unify the balances and facilitate the transaction with one click.
“Trails works by taking exactly that transaction and going backwards,” says Kietlyka. The company’s CEO pitted the platform’s transaction flow against those requiring a specific path, and wallets indicate users have “not enough money or not enough gas” if everything isn’t perfect.
“If you don’t have any of these things in the right place, you’re kind of toast,” he said. “There’s way too much friction and things users don’t have to think about.”
But with Trails, according to Kietlyka, the transaction will come as long as there is one path to the desired outcome.
“Trails is like practical chain abstraction,” said Shun Kakinoki, head of cross-chain at Sequence, speaking about the platform’s ability to simplify the experience of interacting between blockchains. Trails will be compatible with USDC publisher Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) and will work with the Katana network.
Kakinoki was the founder of Light, a company with expertise in chain abstraction Sequence acquired earlier this year as it has been completely renamed from Horizon Blockchain Games.
Horizon previously raised money from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Ubisoft and Take-Two Interactive, using their Ethereum-based card game Skyweaver to “demonstrate its blockchain stack.” All told, the company has raised $53 million to date.
In 2023, the company will… released Sequence Builder to simplify Web3 game development, making it easy to add items like NFTs to games, among other blockchain functionality. Now the company’s products support builders across multiple crypto verticals, including DeFi and stablecoins.
Trails is and will be launching this year will initially support 16 Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible chains including Ethereum mainnet, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum, Avalanche, among others.
However, Kietlyka said the platform will support other virtual machines in the future, with the Solana Virtual Machine next on the roadmap.