Epoch Protocol Aims to Fix Web3 Developer Experience

Epoch Protocol Simplifies Web3 Developer Experience

Web3’s explosive growth has come at the cost of developer simplicity. Today’s DApps and bridges span many chains and protocol, forcing engineers into “multi-step processes” full of manual plumbing. A typical cross-chain transfer might require configuring multiple wallets, gas tokens, and contract calls (e.g. deposit on chain A, relay proof, mint on chain B).

DApp developers often must separately integrate bridging SDKs/APIs, swap routers, RPC endpoints for each chain, and demonstrate logic for each protocol. In practice, this makes even simple flows jumbled.

Today, a cross-chain swap feels like juggling too many things at once: you need different wallets for different chains, keep track of gas on each one, and write messy code to connect a bridge here, a DEX there, and handle all the weird edge cases yourself. As Web3 stacks mature, this complexity only grows. Each new chain or L2 adds yet another set of APIs and tools, further fragmenting UX and liquidit

In short, Web3’s current DevEx remains poor. Programmers can spend days fighting platforms instead of building features.

Backing the mission to fix Web3 DevEx, Epoch Protocol has also recently raised $1.2 million from leading Web3 investors including L2Iterative Ventures, Alphemy Capital, G20 Group, Longhash Ventures, SAFE, and HadronFC and supported by a roster of experienced angel investors, including Anurag Arjun (Avail), Prabal Banerjee (Avail), Adrian Brink (Anoma), Matt Wright (Gaianet), Christian Narvaez (Rayo Capital), Georgi Zlatarev (Blocksense), Denver Dsouza (Devfolio) and Shubham Bhandari (Manta Network). This raise is a strong validation that the industry recognizes developer coordination as the missing layer in today’s blockchain stack.

The Broken Bridge/Swap Experience

Bridging and cross-chain swaps illustrate this pain very well. Despite years of development, most bridge integrations are still heavy weight.

For example, a very popular protocol recently announced it’s Developer Toolkit designed to simplify cross-chain transfers provides a dedicated SDK and quote API. But even with this toolkit, teams must manually wire up wallet connections, quote generation, and transaction submission. In other words, it’s bridge is now a bit easier to integrate, but you still have to explicitly think about the bridge in your code.

In practice, many developers resort to stitching together multiple libraries and services: a bridge for token transfer here, a DEX or swap API there, account-abstraction relayers for gas, often tens of moving parts for a simple “send tokens to any chain” feature.

This fragmented approach hurts productivity and correctness. Cross-chain swaps traditionally require too many moving parts, too many edge cases, and way too much waiting around. Every new chain adds another “moving part”: a new gas token, a new RPC endpoint, a new set of approvals. Users end up having to manually bridge tokens away and back again; developers handle it by literally sending them off to a bridge UI. This handoff creates friction in UX and technical debt in the code. Such a process is the opposite of a smooth Web2 experience, where a single API call can already span databases and microservices seamlessly.

In short, bridging/swapping devX is still broken in Web3. Even dedicated cross-chain SDKs or relayers reduce work only partially. Many teams end up integrating many specialized tools (bridges, swaps, account-abstraction bundlers) just to accomplish what a modern API should do in one shot. This high integration overhead is a major pain point for Web3 developers transitioning from Web2 environments.

And the problem isn’t limited to swaps. The same pattern repeats across other protocols: lending requires stitching together collateral management, interest raise, and liquidation monitoring; staking demands custom integrations for validators, reward claims, and restaking flows; prediction markets involve multiple contracts for positions, payouts, and settlement. Each of these use cases forces developers to juggle custom SDKs and brittle code instead of focusing on their product.

Epoch Protocol abstracts all of this complexity behind a unified intent-based layer. Developers declare what they want to achieve whether that’s bridging, lending, staking, or creating a prediction market position and Epoch’s solver network handles the orchestration, sequencing, and settlement. The result is a Web2-like developer experience where complex multi-chain, multi-protocol interactions reduce to a few lines of code.

Epoch Protocol’s Web2-Like Approach

Epoch Protocol addresses these pains by abstracting all of this complexity behind a unified intent-based layer. Instead of hand-coding every bridge, swap, and gas payment, developers using Epoch simply declare “what they want to achieve” in a high-level intent. Under the hood, Epoch’s network of solvers and plug-ins figures out the how.

For example, a developer can express an intent like:

“Stake 1,000 USDC on Ethereum into a Polygon-based staking protocol.”

With today’s tooling, that workflow would normally involve: bridging assets from Ethereum to Polygon, swapping into the correct staking token, provisioning a wallet on Polygon, ensuring sufficient gas on both chains, and finally interacting with the staking contract. Each of those steps is brittle and chain-specific.

With Epoch, the developer writes just a few lines using the SDK or API. Epoch automatically orchestrates the full cross-chain pipeline by selecting the optimal bridge, handling swaps, provisioning gas, and executing the staking transaction.

Behind the scenes, the SDK packages the intent and automates all the necessary steps that used to take hours, and sometimes days: nonce management, wallet deployment, signing and bundling, and attaching on-chain verification data. The result: developers cut development time from days to hours.

You no longer hand-craft raw transactions for each chain and service. Instead, the SDK prepares a user operation (userOp) that encapsulates the entire intent whether it’s swaps, staking, or even interacting with multi-step DeFi protocols like Polymarket complete with all approvals, state constraints, and cross-chain settlements.

Developer-Centric Features

Epoch’s toolkit is explicitly designed with developer experience in mind. Key features include:

• Declarative Intents and State Constraints. Instead of piecing together transactions, developers describe a goal. For example, an intent might be “move 100 USDT from Ethereum to Polygon and swap to DAI”. The Epoch SDK lets you attach state constraints and conditions to your intents, and the network handles execution when those conditions are met. The result is less burden on developers to monitor chains or code custom triggers: Epoch’s Hyperion observers watch the blockchains and fire the transaction once, say, a price or time condition is satisfied.

• Plug-and-Play Solvers. Under Epoch’s hood, multiple intent solvers (algorithms or oracles) can be consulted to find the best route for each part of the intent (swaps, bridges, lending, etc.). Developers don’t have to integrate or query each protocol’s API themselves. For example, if swapping A→B requires best price, Epoch might query several DEX aggregators automatically. If bridging is needed, Epoch can either use its liquidity pools or call external bridges. All of this is coordinated by Epoch’s Sub-Intent Orchestrator (SIO) so that the optimal set of transactions is generated.

• Liquidity Pools for Instant Bridging. Epoch provides dedicated liquidity pools on each chain to eliminate manual bridging delays. Instead of waiting for a traditional bridge (lock-and-mint) to finalize, Epoch can execute the destination transaction immediately and settle the source chain in the background. Users get tokens instantly on the target chain and later submit proof to reimburse the pool. This gives near-instant cross-chain transfers with low fees, without the developer writing any custom bridge logic.
  
  

In short, Epoch doesn’t give you dozens of connectors. You specify what you want (via an intent), and the system handles the rest.

Beyond simplifying cross-chain development, the recent fundraise is also a commitment to the developer journey itself. A large portion of resources will go into strengthening Epoch’s infrastructure, making the network more reliable under real usage. Just as important, Epoch is prioritizing better documentation, SDK guides, and onboarding flows so developers don’t waste weeks deciphering scattered forum posts or reverse engineering code. The goal is to make building on Epoch feel like building with modern Web2 tools: clear, well-documented, and supported by an active ecosystem.