Squid raises $3.5 million to build next-generation cross-chain swaps powered by Axelar
We are thrilled to share the news that Squid has raised a $3.5 million seed round led by North Island Ventures. The funding will allow us to deliver on our mission to make moving any token across chains as simple, secure and efficient as possible.
Leading crypto investment firms Distributed Global, Fabric Ventures, Galileo, Chapter One and Node Capital also participated in the round. Angels included Waikit Lau, Stani Kulechov, Zaki Manian, Dean Eigenmann, 7, Tamlyn Rudolph, Ashleigh Schap and others. The round is also supported by Axelar, after Squid was one of the first projects to receive funding following Axelar Developer Grants.
“We believe the future of crypto is multi-chain and cross-chain, and are extremely excited to back the great team at Squid, which is building critical infrastructure to bring this vision to fruition.”
Travis Scher — North Island Ventures
The emergence of new ecosystems and chains has brought many exciting opportunities for adoption and real-world use cases, but the rapid pace of development has led to major UX challenges: Users are left with inconveniently wrapped assets, spend excessive time researching how to move tokens across chains, and navigate complex bridge architectures that create potential attack surfaces for hackers.
Aside from being frustrating for users, these challenges have the potential to hinder the growth and adoption of decentralized applications — which, especially after recent events across the crypto industry, are crucial for offering a secure, transparent alternative to centralized systems.
The time is right for decentralization, but for decentralized apps to truly become a viable alternative to centralized ones, they must offer comparable UX, security and overall efficiency.
How does Squid solve these challenges?
Squid acts as a router that connects existing DEX liquidity across chains through Axelar’s secure cross-chain platform. Users can get any token on any of Axelar’s supported chains in a single click. Each swap is powered by Axelar, inheriting their speed, security and wide chain coverage.
Squid’s goal is to put this powerful, user-centric approach into the hands of developers who are building the next generation of crypto-native apps. We enable this through our API, SDK and front-end widget, a prebuilt UI that takes minutes to integrate.
Squid gives reliable, unrestricted access to liquidity everywhere. Apps can continue to operate on the chain that fits their needs, while scaling to reach anyone with a crypto wallet.
Beyond token swaps: Crypto’s interoperable era
In Squid’s vision of interoperability, apps can seamlessly connect to each other, and users can access any app they want instantly — without having to worry about the underlying chain.
Beyond token swaps, we’re excited to unlock the potential of Axelar’s General Message Passing to enable truly chain-agnostic apps. Using GMP, swaps and on-chain function calls can be linked together to do things like buying an NFT on any chain with any asset, depositing into a margin account on a decentralized derivatives exchange, enhancing wallets, payments infrastructure and more.
The era of GMP is only just getting started, and we can’t wait to see how it will revolutionize the industry.
From EVM to the Cosmos and beyond
Squid’s mainnet launch includes support for 25 chains, including interoperability between EVM chains and the Cosmos. As big admirers of IBC and app-chains, we are proud to offer the easiest path for users to onboard to new Cosmos chains from any ecosystem.
As Axelar’s list of supported chains grows, so does Squid’s, and along with it access to liquidity on that chain.
Use Squid today
Squid’s cross-chain app can be found at app.squidrouter.com, where users can swap between any native token on CHAINS. We will roll out front-end support to our full list of chains in the coming weeks.
We are thrilled that DEXs including QuickSwap, Pangolin, SpookySwap, StellaSwap and Trisolaris, and wallets such as Ledger and BitKeep — are some of the first projects to integrate Squid to give their users access to native tokens on a wide range of chains beyond their home chain.
Follow Squid on Twitter and join our Discord for additional announcements and project updates.
Squid is now live on EVM chains Ethereum, Moonbeam, Binance Chain, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Polygon, Fantom and Celo. Cosmos chains include Cosmos Hub, Crescent, Injective, Juno, Kujira, Osmosis, Secret Network, Terra-2, Agoric, AssetMantle, Axelar, Comdex, Evmos, Fetch, Ki, Regen and Umee.
Squid’s contracts have received four independent audits from Ackee Blockchain and Consensys Diligence. You can read more about Squid’s audits here.
