Why 'One Identity Per Chain' is a Dead-End Philosophy

Assets and reputation are trapped. A user's $10M DeFi position on Arbitrum is invisible to a lending protocol on Base, forcing over-collateralization and capital inefficiency. This siloing is why cross-chain intent architectures like UniswapX and CowSwap are essential for atomic composability.

• Capital Efficiency Loss: Users must re-stake/re-collateralize on each chain.
• Protocol Lock-In: DApps cannot leverage a user's holistic financial graph.

Every new chain forces identity systems to rebuild trust from zero. A user's verified credential on Optimism provides no security benefit on Scroll, requiring redundant attestations and KYC checks. This is the core inefficiency that universal attestation layers like Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) and Verax aim to solve.

• Trust Redundancy: Security assumptions and audits are not portable.
• User Friction: Re-verification for each chain and application.

Smart contracts cannot natively read or write to identity state on another chain. A gaming NFT's achievement history on Immutable zkEVM cannot trigger a loyalty reward on Polygon without a brittle, trust-minimized bridge like LayerZero or Axelar. This breaks the promise of a unified web3 experience.

• Broken Composability: Applications are archipelagos, not continents.
• Oracle Dependency: State synchronization relies on external messaging layers.

Users must manage separate addresses, gas tokens, and approval states for each chain. This creates massive friction for cross-chain activity.

• User Drop-off: ~40%+ of DeFi users abandon multi-chain transactions.
• Security Risk: Managing 5+ private keys or seed phrases is untenable.
• Capital Inefficiency: $10B+ in liquidity is siloed and underutilized across chains.

Projects like Safe{Wallet}, Biconomy, and ZeroDev deploy smart contract wallets that unify identity across chains via ERC-4337.

• Chain-Agnostic: A single signer controls a deterministic address on every EVM chain.
• Batch Operations: Approve & swap across Uniswap, Aave, Compound in one gas-paid transaction.
• Session Keys: Enable gasless transactions and automated strategies without constant signing.

Systems like UniswapX, CowSwap, and Across separate user intent from execution, making the underlying chain irrelevant.

• Declarative UX: User states "I want X token at best price"; solvers compete across LayerZero, CCIP, Wormhole.
• Cost Absorption: Solvers bundle and optimize, often resulting in -50% net cost for users.
• Failover Logic: If Ethereum is congested, execution automatically routes to Arbitrum or Base.

Networks like Polygon zkEVM, zkSync Era, and Scroll are building hyper-connected L2s, but the real aggregation happens at the oracle and messaging layer.

• Shared Provers: A single ZK proof can verify state across multiple chains (see Polygon AggLayer).
• Unified Liquidity: Bridges like Across use a single canonical pool, reducing liquidity fragmentation.
• Native Cross-Chain Calls: Chainlink CCIP and LayerZero V2 enable smart contracts to call functions on any chain directly.

Users don't live on one chain; their capital and activity are inherently multi-chain. A single-chain identity forces users to silo assets, creating massive operational overhead and missed yield opportunities.

• Locks liquidity across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Solana, Base.
• Increases bridging costs and security risks for simple portfolio management.
• Contradicts the fundamental promise of a unified, composable financial system.

Managing a unique identity per chain is a non-starter for mainstream adoption. It replicates the worst aspects of Web2 (multiple logins) without any of the convenience.

• Breaks session persistence: Signing into every dApp on every chain.
• Destroys social graphs: Your reputation and connections don't travel with you.
• Makes onboarding impossible: Explaining 'chain-specific identities' to a normie is a losing battle.

A per-chain identity doesn't enhance security; it creates more attack surfaces and reduces privacy through chain-hopping analysis. It's security theater.

• Increases key management risk: More keys, more loss vectors.
• Easier to correlate: Activity across chains is still linkable via funding sources and timing.
• Fails the zk-proof test: Modern privacy (e.g., Aztec, Zcash) and identity (e.g., Sismo, Worldcoin) tech proves identity can be portable and private.

Blockchain's killer feature is composability—the ability for contracts to call each other seamlessly. A chain-bound identity shatters this at the user layer.

• Breaks cross-chain intents: Systems like UniswapX, CowSwap, and Across rely on portable user intent.
• Stifles innovation: New primitives like ERC-4337 account abstraction and layerzero's omnichain contracts require identity to be a network-level property.
• Makes DAOs unworkable: Governance participation fractures across each chain's native identity system.

Chains compete for users, not host them. A 'one identity per chain' model incentivizes chains to create walled gardens and extract maximum value from trapped users, which is anti-ecosystem.

• Promotes rent-seeking: Higher fees and worse terms for 'captive' identities.
• Discourages interoperability: Why make it easy to leave?
• Contradicts the modular thesis: In a world of rollups, validiums, and app-chains, identity must be a shared resource, like security.

The market has already voted. Wallets (MetaMask, Rainbow), infra (Privy, Dynamic), and standards (EIP-3074, ERC-4337) are all abstracting chain-specific details away from the user. Fighting this is futile.

• Users choose convenience: They use one seed phrase across all EVM chains already.
• The future is chain-agnostic: Solutions like Polygon ID, ENS, and SPACE ID point to a unified, portable identity layer.
• Philosophy becomes legacy tech: A stubborn adherence to per-chain identity is the IE6 of blockchain.