Squid brings native cross-chain swaps to 25 blockchains
Jan. 31, 2023 at 10:39 pm
By Liam 'Akiba' Wright
Axelar powered protocol, Squid, raised $3.5M to bring cross-chain swaps to EVM and Cosmos ecosystems
Squid, a cross-chain routing protocol powered by Axelar, has closed a $3.5 million seed round to build native-to-native cross-chain token swaps.
The protocol will allow developers on 25 chains to swap tokens across blockchains natively. Axelar, the blockchain messaging network, supported the raise as a “strategic investment.”
A Squid announcement said,
“There are so many ecosystems and chains out there waiting to be explored, but gaining access to them can feel impossible. Obscure wrapped assets, confusing bridge UX and the need for extensive research – just to move tokens securely across chains…”
Swapping tokens across chains can be cumbersome, confusing, and expensive. Further, bridges are often weak points in terms of security, with numerous bridge hacks over the last few years. Tokens sent through a bridge are locked on the native chain and then wrapped as a token on the destination chain, such as wLUNA or pBTC. As a result, many investors opt to use centralized exchanges for moving tokens from one blockchain to another.
Squid will allow DEXs to add the native tokens of other chains to their offering. Outside of centralized exchanges, current options for cross-chain swaps are limited. THORChain is one of the main blockchains to offer cross-chain swaps through its RUNE token-paired liquidity pools. THORSwap is a DEX built on THORChain currently offering cross-chain swaps across 8 different networks. It has a TVL of over $132 million and processes a daily swap volume of around $20 million.
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