HOT Labs Unveils Binance 3.0 Vision for Cross-Chain DeFi

HOT Labs, a pioneering force in the blockchain space, has unveiled its ambitious "Binance 3.0" vision, aiming to revolutionize cross-chain decentralized finance (DeFi) with innovative solutions. The company's Co-Founder and CTO, Andrey Zhevlakov, shared insights into the journey of HOT Labs and the technical intricacies of their groundbreaking developments during an interview.

Zhevlakov's journey into the blockchain space began three years ago when he and Petr Volnov set out to build the best mobile wallet for the NEAR blockchain. Recognizing the fragmented nature of the Web3 ecosystem, they focused on solving two major pain points for users: protection from scammers and the ability to move funds across different chains. This led to the development of the MPC protocol and HOT Omni, which laid the foundation for HOT Labs.

The concept of a "meta-balance" is central to HOT Omni. This single non-custodial balance, stored on NEAR, keeps track of what the user owns across other chains like Stellar, TON, and Solana. It acts as the main point of interaction, allowing users to transfer, swap, or withdraw assets across chains from one place without worrying about the underlying network. This is achieved through intents, which are executed by the system, eliminating the need for users to switch wallets or pay gas in different tokens.

HOT Omni leverages trustless lockers and an MPC + TEE network, providing significant advantages in terms of security, efficiency, and capital requirements. The MPC protocol offers various opportunities for managing access to multichain accounts, including changing seed phrases, full 2FA, and limited access to certain smart contracts. This enables the creation of a truly decentralized exchange, Binance 3.0, which can interact with DeFi assets from multiple networks using a single smart contract written in Rust.

This "write once, deploy everywhere" paradigm has broader implications for the DeFi ecosystem. It could lead to a partial rejection of centralized exchanges and chain-specific dapps, simplifying the user experience and facilitating mass adoption. Currently, users have to manage multiple wallets, pay for gas, and deal with the complexities of each chain's infrastructure. HOT Labs aims to address these issues by providing tools for developing chain-abstraction applications.

One of the biggest misconceptions about cross-chain interoperability is that bridging tokens between chains is enough. HOT Omni addresses this by introducing intent-based chain abstraction, where users interact with a unified meta-balance on NEAR that represents assets locked across chains. This model removes the need for users to interact with each blockchain directly, achieving practical interoperability without sacrificing decentralization or self-custody.

Building and scaling HOT Omni has come with significant technical and operational hurdles. Standardizing the various standards, formats, and approaches used by different blockchains required extensive debugging and iterations. Verifying transaction finality across different networks was another major challenge, but the MPC network allowed HOT Labs to solve this relatively quickly. The most difficult part, however, lies ahead: popularizing the technology and onboarding developers and projects.

Looking ahead, HOT Labs plans to refine the SDK for interaction with HOT Omni and the MPC protocol, as well as develop a fully-featured chain-abstraction DeFi exchange outside of their wallet. Strategic partnerships with major blockchains and Layer 2 networks, as well as integrating new, specialized chains like Sui and Aptos, are also on the agenda. This will further enhance the utility and reach of the HOT Omni platform, supporting an even broader range of blockchain networks and DeFi primitives in the future.