OneBalance: Bringing One-Click UX to Onchain Transactions

One of the most glaring observations—repeated ad nauseam—over the past decade is the need to improve crypto UX. Specifically, to improve the UX of transacting onchain. Of course, I fully agree with the observation and sentiment. With blockchain technology sitting eagerly in the early majority section on the tech adoption bell curve, ease of use is now more crucial than ever. The big challenge is and has been: how do we fix this?

Both the problem and objective have been obvious; the solution less so. It’s about balancing security, seamless UX, and self-custody. We’re all familiar with the blockchain trilemma. However, this is easier said than done. It’s particularly difficult to enact solutions when the tech itself undergoes constant, rapid change—an unavoidable aspect of the blockchain industry. It’s hard to “abstract the complexity” when the complexity you’re trying to abstract is evolving by the day—and evolving across multiple protocol layers.

The underlying challenge is the reality: we live in a multi-chain world. Applications and assets exist across disparate chains. Users do not want to establish and fund a separate wallet for each chain, and they certainly don’t want to hold the native gas token needed to pay transaction fees on each chain. This way of transacting is so counter to what users know in the web2 world, where most of these smaller, tedious elements are handled in the background

In general, I’ve viewed this as something that would be solved by wallets and applications that are closest and most responsive to users. Frontends have been able to manifest this to an extent. The experience of using crypto today is meaningfully better than it was just a couple of years ago: wallets like Phantom have created an incredible user experience, and common user activities like bridging are much faster, cheaper, and more reliable than they used to be.

These are big steps forward, for sure, but in large part, this has been a practice of plastering over the underlying challenge instead of solving it. I certainly don’t blame the wallets and applications – it would be too distracting a sidequest to attempt to solve the whole problem.

Users simply want one account from which they can use any onchain application and manage any onchain asset. Regardless of the host chain, every onchain application and asset should functionally feel “one-click” away.

That’s exactly why we’re thrilled to co-lead OneBalance’s $20M financing. Their newly released OneBalance Toolkit eliminates cross-chain complexity by providing developers with a solution to create that ideal one-click user experience we have discussed for years. It does this by providing a set of APIs designed to work with any wallet-as-a-service providers like Privy and Turnkey to deliver unified cross-chain experiences for applications, eliminating the need for developers to build complex infrastructure from scratch and scale as they grow. 

Since OneBalance introduced Resource Locks in May 2024, they have become a core milestone of the Ethereum interoperability roadmap, with active development from Circle, Uniswap, and LiFi.  This breakthrough innovation eliminates the multiple-step process that makes cross-chain transactions so inefficient by parallelizing the steps instead of doing them sequentially. Users lock funds in a OneBalance account and sign a transaction showing their intent. Solvers can immediately release funds on the destination chain upon seeing this signature, without waiting for confirmation on the source chain, because Resource Locks guarantee eventual payment. This solves the double-spend problem that forces current systems to wait for finality, enabling instant, reliable cross-chain transactions without compromising security.

This cross-chain architecture delivers measurable improvements for both users and developers. For users: 40% faster execution than traditional cross-chain routes, guaranteed execution without reverts, and cheaper rates by eliminating front-running and price impact. For developers: No more complex multichain coordination, so they can build user flows that depend only on the destination chain. The result: faster development cycles, reduced costs, and simple balance abstraction across multiple chains.

In short, their new account framework does exactly what it says on the tin: it wraps user state from every chain into a unified balance across any network. Moreover, users can spend or otherwise utilize those balances across disparate chains without worrying about the underlying networks, bridging, or holding native gas tokens. This is the user experience we’ve yearned for.

Stephane Gosselin, former co-founder of Flashbots, currently serves as OneBalance’s CEO, with co-founders Daniel Worsley (COO) and Ankit Chiplunkar (Head of Research) by his side. Stephane has proven exceptionally adept at evangelizing complex solutions and taking incredibly nuanced advanced tech to market in a way that’s adoptable and sticky. Overall, the team impressed us with their pragmatic approach and tireless efforts to tackle the interop challenge. 

The OneBalance Toolkit is now moving from closed beta to open access, and developers can already use it to enable instant native Bitcoin to EVM swaps (!!) — with Solana and other networks launching in the coming weeks. In other words, Bitcoin’s $2T market is now only 1-click away from apps in other ecosystems

We’re excited to get the chance to work with the OneBalance team, and looking forward to watching them build a crypto future that everyone can participate in seamlessly.