Squid is the application that makes cross-chain mainstream, and invisible.
Blockchains are about digital value, and Squid is a protocol for sending value across chains. Single chain ecosystems have incredible permissionless composability, famously dubbed “DeFi legos”, but this has been missing across-chains until now.
Squid makes it trivial to build legos between chains, and for users to play with legos that live anywhere. Squid will bring a new era of interacting with applications, rather than infrastructure.
Generalised message passing > Bridges
Bridges do not allow us to build cross-chain legos. No one can buy an NFT across chain or connect a derivatives exchange on one chain to a multi-chain yield aggregator using a bridge. Bridges fragment liquidity, require hops between many applications, and result in users taking on unnecessary risks. Bridges are not enough to keep expanding the crypto ecosystem.
Instead, Squid uses general message passing. General message passing allows us to get value across chains without locking up more assets on a bridge and creating a massive honey pot, ripe for hackers.
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What is Squid?
Squid is the liquidity and messaging router built on Axelar. We allow applications to implement fast, secure and seamless cross-chain logic into their products, making life easier for builders and users alike.
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Smart contracts
Squid has a smart contract on every EVM chain which Axelar connects to. When one of Squid’s contracts is called, it executes some swaps and then asks Axelar to call a Squid contract on another chain. Our contracts act as agents which act on behalf of the user on other chains, be it swapping tokens, making a deposit cross chains, or buying an NFT. However, the contracts never have special permissions or tokens locked to them, they’re like an instant postal service built on Axelar’s highways.
API + SDK (backend)
Tell our API that you want to swap from AAVE on Ethereum to WNEAR on Aurora, and our backend passes back a bit of data which you can sign with Metamask or ethers.js. This makes it trivial to build cross-chain swap transactions, and extend them with further contract calls.
Front-end widget
Squid has built a reference implementation front-end which you can use in your app. It is a react component that can be easily rebranded and installed into a front-end. For teams who want to go cross-chain with only 1–2 days dev work, this is your solution. The widget also supports simple bridging, and cross-chain deposits.
How it works: Hub & Spoke liquidity
Squid uses Uniswap, Curve and other supported DEXes to swap any token between any chain via Axelar. Every swap is into or out of the bridging token axlUSDC. What this means is that users don’t ever need to hold wrapped assets in their wallet, and Squid can support any token with the addition of only a single axlUSDC/USDC liquidity pool.
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Squid is built on simplicity. We do one thing, and one thing very well: cross-chain messaging and swaps.
Axelar
Axelar is a layer 1 blockchain like any of the trusted L1s we use daily. Its purpose is to provide general message passing between other blockchains, and Squid realises the potential of this by providing user and developer friendly tools and interfaces. Axelar is the most secure and reliable interoperability solution on the market.
Security
Squid’s contracts are designed to never hold assets, and to be as general as possible while remaining reliably secure. Squid’s contracts have been audited by Ackee Blockchain and Consensys Diligence.
24 Chains, Hub and Spoke scaling
Currently Axelar supports 24 chains, and is ramping up quickly and securely thanks to its Hub and Spoke design. A Hub and Spoke model with 24 chains requires 24 cross-chain connections to function, while a point to point model requires 288 connections for full connectivity.
Other interoperability projects are stalling at supporting single digit numbers of chains while Axelar races ahead. Squid supports all chains which Axelar supports. All supported chains can be seen at AxelarScan
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All of the tokens
Squid supports any ERC20 token. There are so many amazing teams building innovative DeFi, and we don’t need to re-invent the wheel trying to deploy our own way of swapping assets. We just focus on cross-chain. We are working closely with DEX teams to enable cross-chain via their applications. Think of it as cross-chain as a service. CCaaS? 🧐
Speed
As fast as 15 seconds. If you’re swapping between two instant finality chains, Squid will do a cross-chain swap and/or message in about 4 blocks. This will get faster with time and could eventually approach 1 block across both chains. For chains that don’t have good finality characteristics, like Polygon, the user will need to wait longer. This is becoming rarer as layer 1 technology improves. This speed is thanks to Axelar.
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Fees
Squid currently charges no fees. The user only pays for gas on the source chain, Axelar’s chain and the destination chain.
Composability
Unlike nearly all other cross-chain swaps and bridges. Squid is built on top of generalised message passing, built from the ground up for composability. The implications of this are far reaching across many different verticals. Buy an NFT on any chain, no matter what asset you have in your wallet, and what chain you live on. Build a dashboard for any DeFi opportunity on any chain. Deposit into a margin account on a decentralised exchange in one click.
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Scaling the cross-chain future
After integrating Squid, and possibly one of the fiat on-ramp partners, the total addressable market for an application becomes essentially anyone with a credit card, bank account or a crypto wallet. On one end, Squid partners with decentralised applications, and on the other with fiat on-ramps and wallets, to enable a user experience which is totally unparalleled. If you’ve heard of it, you can get it via Squid.
If you want to learn more, read our docs and get in touch with the Squid team on Discord or Twitter.