OneBalance: Transcending Networks

We are proud to announce our investment in OneBalance, the project that is pushing Chain Abstraction to its limits with Resource Locks. We have led their strategic round, and later doubled down and co-led their Series A. In this piece, we unpack the rationale behind our bet.

The crypto user experience is still broken: navigating across various chains/wallets/dapps is difficult and confusing. Users crave simplicity — they want frictionless, 1-click experience that is intuitive and hides technical complexities. That is exactly what OneBalance enables, through its unique intent-solver execution solution powered by Resource Locks — a foundational primitive that enables speed & cost-efficiency via credible commitments. 

OneBalance allows wallets and dapps to solve users' core challenges: managing assets across chains and simplifying complex transactions, all while having the simplest possible Web2-like user experience. With good UX, crypto will attract a massive wave of new users. And they will be happy to pay meaningful fees for products that "just work", allowing applications to capture more value. 

On a higher level, fragmentation in crypto is not only a huge pain point, but also the biggest growth barrier for multi-chain network effects. By being at the heart of the interoperability supply chain, OneBalance is poised to capitalize on the blockspace commoditization trend, and ultimately future growth of our industry.

Background: Aggregation & Intents

In the early days of DeFi, users interacted with DeFi protocols directly through DEX front-ends. Without aggregators, users had to find & choose DEXs to swap their assets. When aggregators entered the market, they quickly became users' preferred way to interact with blockchains. This rapid adoption made sense—aggregators provided better transaction outputs while eliminating the need for users to search through various liquidity sources themselves. Aggregators were essentially machines that found the best trading paths for users. However, they remained centralized and fell short of creating truly open markets. This limitation paved the way for intent-based architectures.

Intents are simple: just like in aggregators, users don’t specify the exact liquidity path through which they want to swap their assets — they simply sign their desired outcome, aka intent. After that external actors called solvers compete to provide users with the best results. Users only need to specify what they want—the protocol handles everything else. As described below, the intent satisfaction path with the best output wins the auction, and the winning solver executes the transactions for the user.

As a result of intent-based architectures, most leading DEXs and cross-chain bridges now run on intents—and they're working well!

Challenges around Intent-based Solutions

As more chains enter production, fragmentation becomes a problem. Intent-based chain abstraction solves this challenge by connecting and executing across multiple chains. It improves the developer experience by removing the complexities of building across different chains, while enhancing user experience by abstracting away the underlying chains that applications run on. However, chain abstraction presents multiple challenges.

Challenge 1. Double Spend Guarantees. Current intent protocols have a relatively high latency because solvers need to wait for users’ source chain transaction inclusion (or, in some cases, finality) — otherwise a double spend attack can occur, as described below. This is a crucial limitation that prevents current intent solutions from providing synchronous capabilities in their products.

Challenge 2: Ecosystem specific intents. Most intent-based protocols are limited to specific ecosystems, which restricts the types of applications that can be built on top of them. Currently, there's no solution that allows users to maintain one balance across all chains like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana.

These limitations prevent current intent-based systems from providing the ultimate solution for users. Cross-chain dapps need incremental improvement, and this is where OneBalance steps in, using resource locks to accelerate intent-based architectures towards their end-game: secure yet fast multi-chain future.

Resource Locks & OneBalance

Resource lock is a core mechanism in OneBalance — it provides solvers with payment guarantees before transactions are included on chains. This means that user intents can be executed immediately upon users signing their transactions. OneBalance implements resource locks through their Credible Commitment Machine (CCM), which provides double spend guarantees to solvers, and at the same time maintains users’ self-custody. One can view CCM as a Decentralized Allocator.

Powered by resource locks, accounts in OneBalance work like a 2/2 multisig, with the user controlling one signature and the CCM controlling the other. When creating an intent, the user first signs the message with their key. By not immediately giving the 2nd signature, the CCM then guarantees solvers that they will be paid after executing the user's intent. Finally, the CCM signs the intent once the solver completes the transaction. This means users' intents are resolved at the speed of inclusion on the destination chain, creating the best possible UX for intents.

Left: intent-based system without resource locks; Right: intent-based system with resource locks

In practice, the above technology uniquely enables multi-chain products to have Web2-like user experience. Imagine you have Bitcoin and want to buy an NFT on Solana — with OneBalance, web3 applications can offer their users a single click, CEX-like experience that's fully onchain. Also, with OneBalance users can have the same authentication method across all chains and decentralized applications — no more wallet fragmentation.

The evolution of blockchain interaction—from basic DEX interfaces to aggregators and now intent-based architectures—reveals a clear trend: users demand simpler, more powerful, and more abstracted experiences. While intents address many UX challenges, they still face fundamental limitations in composability, fragmentation, and credible execution. OneBalance solves these challenges with resource locks, providing synchronous guarantees while preserving decentralization and self-custody.

The OneBalance ToolKit and the OneApp

OneBalance offers a production-ready toolkit (onebalance.io/toolkit) designed to seamlessly integrate into developers’ existing stacks, featuring compatibility with Privy and Turnkey. Its modular architecture empowers developers with the flexibility to incorporate additional solutions of their choice, eliminating gatekeeping and avoiding the limitations of closed AA infrastructures. 

The OneBalance team also built OneApp (app.onebalance.io), which demonstrates the power of Resource Locks and true Chain Abstraction by delivering a chain-agnostic experience. It aggregates balances across all chains, ensuring users always receive the best available prices. OneApp allows users to buy any token in one click—at the best price—with a fast, reliable, chain-abstracted, Web2-like experience.

The Team behind OneBalance

The OneBalance founding team brings unmatched experience in protocol architecture, operations, and research. Stephane Gosselin (CEO) is a pioneer in MEV infrastructure and protocol design, having co-founded Flashbots and worked on protocol design at Numerai. Daniel Worsley (COO) combines deep crypto ops expertise from Flashbots and co-founding LocalCoinSwap, while Ankit Chiplunkar (CTO brings technical depth and excellence, with a background spanning Coinbase, Airbus and IIT Bombay.

Backed by a leadership team with proven execution across the stack—from engineering and custody to GTM and ecosystem growth—OneBalance is built by the same minds who have shaped Ethereum tooling, scaled user-facing crypto products, and led high-impact infrastructure. With experience at Aragon, Polygon, Argent, RhinoFi, and more, this team is uniquely positioned to bring crypto’s core infrastructure to the mainstream.

Balancing the multi-chain Future

In essence, OneBalance unlocks great developer experience for dapps, which in turn enables them to build superior user experience and capture more value. OneBalance handles instant and secure transaction processing behind the scenes, freeing developers to concentrate fully on designing intuitive, user-friendly interfaces. As a consequence, users enjoy frictionless experiences, their engagement deepens, and their willingness to pay premium fees grows. This is how OneBalance ultimately drives higher monetization for onchain applications.

OneBalance is a chain-agnostic execution protocol, a core primitive for the future of intent-based applications. With OneBalance, the multi-chain ecosystem doesn't need to merge into a single chain—it can maintain its diversity while feeling like one. This represents the incremental innovation the industry has been seeking. cyber•Fund is proud to support OneBalance as they build this future—where chains remain decentralized, users maintain sovereignty, and the experience becomes seamless. One human, one wallet, OneBalance.