LIQUIDITY ROUTER with Fig of Squid

Transcript

welcome to the interrupt my guest today is fig he's a co-founder at squid they're a liquidity and message passing router built on axar in today's conversation we'll discuss how Dev Vel and leverage squid and their apps to facilitate cross chain swaps we'll also talk about user experience and how squid is making ux better in crypto we'll also talk about how it compares to other inability Solutions we'll get into Axel which of course squid uses as a message passing layer we talk about Native usdc on Cosmos and the launch of dydx and the future of inability I'm also dying to find out why he thinks intense will lead to the next collapse of crypto before we get started make sure to hit the like button and subscribe to

get notified when new episodes drop every week and remember that none of what we discuss here on the interupt his investment advice and if you enjoy this content please consider staking with us we're validating on OS Quicksilver osmosis Juno and noas my guest fig is coming up next right here on on the a [Music] off hey fig thanks for coming on the podcast hey s thanks for having me nice to be here yeah it's been a while since uh since we've been trying to get this um get this set up and and so I'm glad

we we finally got around to it and uh want to get deep into squid and its role in the inability space it feels like I've been having just only inability protocols um in the last couple of months I mean maybe maybe you'll describe squid as something different than an inability protocol I have a feeling that's the case uh but before we dive into the product and how it works and um it's uh how it leverages Axel uh maybe talk a bit about your background and how you became interested in uh blockchain androp ability yeah sure so my background was in medicine I studied that University and you know a long way away from crypto it

seems but it taught me it was it's a really complex system and I think that follows through into crypto where you have this crazy like this one place the blockchain where everything is interacting being um you know people are building things all the time users are interacting at the same time that things being shipped and you got this almost like living organism that is This Global organism um and yeah medicine was really fun but didn't have the creative side that I wanted or was a bit strict with um with Innovation uh so I left medicon went to New York uh where I got

interested in finance and started programming taught myself to code where I was a freelance D and designer as well for five years or so um but yeah while I was in New York got interested in finance because there was some of my friends that were Traders and they were the ones who first introduced me to crypto um and so I just got an intro intro via that but then once I started digging into the technology fell in love with it and thought it was um it was going to change you know change the fabric of how we did things um as a as a planet civilization so um I actually had a find job at the time and was learning about trfy and thought there were all these things in

my job in trfi which were going to be automated or made so much better by by crypto so made the dive that was around 2020 um and yeah I've been building squid ever since cool you're not the first guy uh that I I talked to that dropped out of bad school to uh to go into crypto uh what's that conversation like when you tell your parents that you're dropping on a meded school to go to go fulltime into crypto or something different well I mean at first it was dropping out of med school to do nothing right it was just to go live in New York and you know became a Dev and then also you know finally got a job in finance and then got into crypto but the dropping out of med school thing is yeah

so hard um because it's seen as an extremely secure life and once you're in like the hardest part is getting in and then you sort of got it set I mean very very difficult the 10 15 years following that all of my friends you know had to go through but um I think my parents are they see that as the right thing like I'm so much more happy doing this than being in what I think is quite a corporate job being a doctor um in an environment that you know isn't as uh isn't as sort of experimental you don't want your doctor to be you playing playing with you trying new things out and making things better like in prod uh so

yeah yeah it's like the the absolute um opposite ethos to to the the ethos of crypto right where I mean you you don't want to be testing in production but always innovating it's like constant Innovation and and it seems like I mean I feel like it's been that way for the last 10 years like I I I haven't seen a Slowdown in Innovation right even even after multiple cycles and and this current you know bare Market Market Builder cycle whatever you want to call it there's just so much Innovation happening again right and and and like the narrative is different than the last cycle I think one of the big narratives and certainly like one that like squid

operates in is is inability and um creating trust minimizing and permissionless ways to pass messages and tokens between different domains of State like that is such a huge part of I think you know the next cycle and it's going to be interesting to see uh which which of which of the projects which of the players in this narrative that are crafting this narrative are are really going to like Pierce through to the next the next wave right um so yeah let's talk about squid so yeah at a high level what is squid and who are you building this product

for so I can start with squid squid was born out of the need to interact with blockchains when there's not just one blockchain that's like very simply in the early defi summer days before that Bitcoin as well everyone was interacting with ethereum and it was this amazing like creative place where all the apps were interoperable by default because they were on the same blockchain users could use one wallet um and the way they got round was really through dexas they would swap from one token which was compatible with an application to another token which was compatible with an app on the same chain

but then we saw high gas prices things went um you know became unusable basically on ethereum and you have more technology as well you have this like great Innovative uh evolutionary environment where you know like the cosmos Su where you have people spinning up the new blockchains all the time but to go and use those blockchains was to a normal person impossible basically because you you had to go to maybe 30 different we no not 30 websites 30 clicks I think like stargaze to go from ethereum to stargaze was 30 clicks at one point um and it's really scary for people every time they go to a new website you try new application New

Bridge you don't need you need gas to interact with it it's just this ux nightmare so squid was born out of that problem so being able to just a normal user being able to interact with with the blockchain but while utilizing this app chain rollup future that we were expecting um and that's really playing out we've got like a ton of app chains rollups are already working really well and we've got rollup development kits coming out where we're expecting hundreds of thousands of new chains and what squid does is we allow you to if you have a token on one chain you can go to an application's website or you can go to Squid's website and move onto that

new chain that new application in a single click and we in the background use um decentralized protocols for routing your assets through Bridges through ABC through um dexes to get you there so it's really a user experience thing at the end of the day but you need this infrastructure to like synthesize the world of all the up chains r Bridges Etc and compress it down into like a oneclick transaction yeah I like to think of squid as I it's sort of like in the name right it's a squid router it's it's the router for moving assets across different um well I mean in this case

for now at least you know moving assets across different chains uh utilizing an underlying layer which is Axel um but um but it it effectively just routes I mean you break the the product down into a simplest form it just routes tokens so like you have like osmo on osmosis and you want to end up with you know usdc on ethereum um squid will figure out how to uh how to uh swap those tokens at the best rate and move them across those chains so that it's seemless for the user yeah yeah exactly it's um it's a

router we've been saying Google Maps for a long time you go from usdc on ethereum to osmo and we find you the you know Axel might be the roads like there's an intersection which is the osmosis decks you know that kind of thing but what we've realized it's actually more like uber because Uber has this you know this Maps component where they can find you the right way but with Uber you can click take me there and it it sort of all happens for you um and we obviously don't do any of the execution it's all happen all happens on chain but it's yeah it's to be a a cliche startup founder um it's the Uber for their sub for cross chain yeah but I mean ultimately it's it's a B2B Toc product right because I mean you you're building

for developers uh the the users of squid those that are interacting with it or at least like building with squid or developers the ultimate end like the end user that will be utilizing squid perhaps without even knowing it is a a defi user or blockchain user token holder that's trying to move assets across chain um you know when when when talking with developers like what are the biggest pain points that um that they that they see and that like you guys are directly solving for them and like what does a product look like you know I'm a developer and I'm like you know wanting to implement squid in my application what does that look like yeah so our most basic the B most basic thing can do a squ is swap AC cross

chain and Bridge um so that's often what people come to us for and the product is we have our own front end where you can go and do it um we have a an SDK which um is Javascript SDK to be used in front ends and you can build you know very easily your own front end around it which is user is here they want to come to our app and deposit assets in um and we also have widgets which are re pre-built front endend components that you can just put straight into websites PR easy um and developers often especially in the Cosmos come to us because they want to onboard users into the app um and you know you have this

situation where a developers in crypto wants to build something and they have to make a compromise between the technology that they build on and the user base of that technology so you know hence why maybe so many people are building on arbitrum and optimism is because there's already you know hundreds of millions of dollars of liquidity and lots of users there every day but we want to be able to make it so that a developer can build in Cosmos but they can serve their application up to any user whether they're on on arbitrum where they they don't even know they're on arbitrum maybe um and in one click come and use the app whatever it may may be like land Oni or you know go into dydx for example like use osmosis um and

they shouldn't never have to really realize that there was a problem getting there in the first place it's um it's really for onboarding and using applications from anywhere um that's how we usually integrate it so I I think like when thinking about interoperability Solutions and certainly the ones that we've had here on the podcast you know we're talking about um solutions that are uh interacting at the chain level right so they're allowing uh a user to verify the state of a chain or an application to verify the state of another chain in order to move tokens um from one domain of state to another you know in the case of Axel

like Axel sort of sits the Axel Hub sits between um different chains and mitigates uh those transfers uh you know it's safe to say that like squid operates at a different layer of the stack right I mean you guys are not building uh the the plumbing that allows the state to be verified you're leveraging at least for now axlr um as that interop interoperability layer uh underneath squid um can you talk about like what that means for the product and you know from from the perspective of like it's like Business Development right I mean because you're you're also competing with these other interop ability products and maybe can

also get into you know after how you guys are leveraging a yeah sure um so our relationship with a has been amazing because we can each Focus very tightly on our on our own products and axar is at the end the message passing layer and security layer and then where at the user experience and the devx layer as well actually have other teams building directly on them but squid has hundreds of Partners already who have built with Squid but Axel sees them as also building on Axel it's you it's this sort of pass through layer um and the way Squid Works is we we really just take take the

complexity out of interacting with interrupt protocols um and also with dexes because Axel is super powerful in the way that you can do anything across chain but every app that wanted to do onboarding or wanted to do cross chain buying purchases of nfts or loaning a cross chain whatever they all need some kind of swap component as well and so what we've done is we've packaged up swaps and cross chain swaps with bridging and uh message passing as well we've made sure to like keep this fully generic programmability on squid um and that ends up being much more useful to teams because they don't need to build their own like Dex aggre Ator or router in the

house like otherwise there'd be like hundreds of people building their own one where like we we can be that one and then um and yeah then it makes it very easy to integrate with with us and AA um in terms of other Bridges as well we we like to think of so axar is I don't know if your listeners already know who they are but basically they're a cosmos chain who uh all their validators verify messages by um actually they're bringing in a permissionless model so they'll have any any type of verification could be ZK could be IBC which they already support or the cgp model which is where 75 validators vote on State on the state

exists on one chain and you passed that across um we've been aile supports about 60 maybe 70 chains at this point including all the OBC ones and where integrating Crush chain dexes and you know interrup protocol sort of at the edges um certainly the focus is with axela though so like the whatever they support we will always support and we've just integrated ABC so we have some extra chains which aren't connected to Axel um because the idea is that a user of squid should be able to use any anywhere like they shouldn't have to go anywhere else to um to get what they want or to to do something in crypto um and that's Again part of the complexity

we remove is if you had to go to axar bridge and then you had to go to osmosis Do a Swap and then do an ABC transfer to um to the cosmos Hub and then go and stake instead of having to go to know five different websites for that you just go to squid and you do it once um so yeah it's an example of how we're how we're interacting with them so so so the message passing layer is um is independent of the squid router does does that mean that squid could effectively use other message passes passing layers would there be any any interest to do that I mean for like specific chains maybe the axlr doesn't support or like is there is there an

inherent advantage to using axlr that is directly related to the grid product yeah for sure I think any chain that is connected to AXA it's going to have it's going to be much easier for us to add and AXA has this great property where it it is a hub and it's a hub that can connect to um multiple different message passing protocols and we've seen that with with the ABC and their current cgp um we can now connect to with the really the only um product that can connect to both all the the zvm chains and OBC chains in one click um and they're bringing in

their own permission this model where you can bring in you ZK and lots of different things so if someone connects to AXA from the squid point of view it's much easier for us to integrate because they act as a a hub in the hub and spoke model where um every Hub every spoke which is already connected to their Hub will get connectivity to every other spoke and then when you add one new spoke you don't have to add if they support seven new chains you don't need to sport add 69 spokes you need to just add one spoke and then it makes the squid integration level a lot easier so it's like a nice scaling feature and then AXA another huge thing in Cross chain like the hardest thing really is

gas and spending gas across chains um and Aela have their own you know layer on top of their message passing which um you know we've already got a very good understanding of how their gas model works and just getting reliable execution across chains is um is is difficult and by leveraging their gas Network we also can scale a lot faster so it gives us an edge over over partners because there not sorry over Partners over over semi competitors in the evm space who maybe aggregate you know five or six 10 different Bridges because we can move a lot faster we've just got one point of integration and everything is much more predictable how it behaves um yeah there's that and then

I guess there's the security benefit as well compared to lot of the AVM protocols so you talked about the gas uh management can you describe how that works and yeah how does axar manage it and how you guys leveraging that functionality of axar yeah yeah so Axel's model Works how that you um they have the verification there at the bottom which verifies messages using the validator set and that's fully that's using the cosmos chain all decentralized and then the gas layer is permissionless but not decentralized so anyone can provide relay Services anyone

can provide gas services on top and AXA um have a gas service that they've built themselves which that the way that works um is you pay upfront you pay like too much um up front and then you get refunded after so it mean like the biggest issue with gas across chain is because you can't predict what the gas prices are in the other chain without first doing some kind of cross-chain message or um without yourself checking the rpcs it's it sort of has to be offchain in a way um it's either has to be offchain or someone is taking a risk because if an ethereum for example like say some nft launch has just happened gas prices go up to like $200 a

transaction and the users only paid like $6 for their transaction then it looks like a censorship censorship situation but really it's just the the gas ex the relay has no incentive to um to execute so what we do is we overpay by about 50 to 80% um it depends on the Chain because some chains are much more VAR variable than others uh and then the user will get refunded after their destination chain transaction's been executed that way they're never overpaying they always just pay for what they use and that's sort of that's what we've come to sort of lack about blockchains you just if it's expensive and you're willing to pay for

it it's on you it's not on the infrastructure that provid it right okay interesting and how does squid H handle like different um like atomicity guarantees between chains so you know you might have like different finality or um like with an optimistic roll up you know you may have like a uh a a um a fraud proof window that uh needs to expire in order for the transaction to uh to be final so like how does squid handle that and and also yeah does squid also work with Bitcoin I guess since not yeah but we're gonna have it yeah Bitcoin will hopefully come in December we got um partnership with

chain flip for a subra based chain who are doing okay coin swaps really excited about it um Adam Miss City you know theoretically impossible across different blockchains unless you merge the validator sets um you got intents which are you know coming and they provide a nice window into atomicity maybe yeah you have essentially offload the atomis the requirement to make something Atomic to someone else who's you maybe staking something to say I will fulfill this for you in an atomic way um or yeah so anyway without going into into intense because that's tempting we have a nice oh we will okay we will there's a uh there's like a

halfway house that we've we've gotten and it's a system called boost and what it is is that you the user can uh execute the message on the source chain say they're trying to swap usdc on ethereum to um usdc on arbitrum um and usually what you would have to do is you have to wait for the finale for e L1 to finalize after the users submitted their eth transaction before the bridge can you know securely give tokens on arbitrum but what we do is that we allow a another provider uh to provide the bridge tokens to the user on the

destination chain and then execute the exact payload that the users requested which happens to be usually a swap or maybe they're buying an nft something like that they can provide these tokens and execute the payload immediately and then they take on the risk that the you know eel1 sensors the transaction for some reason um and it doesn't give you atomicity but it brings really what's most important uh for the user and that's the speed of a cross chain transaction you can see if finalize uh for you after um we it's under 20 seconds so any from like 1 second to 20 um

and yeah really amazing feature it's been like something that people like using um in Squid it's not available in Cosmos yet but we'll be uh we're building it so it will be able to say go from ethereum to osmosis in less than 20 seconds hopefully to to all the other chains as well so just just to to maybe go on a little tangent on on intense um you know your your hot take was that you you think that intense will eventually lead to everything going off chain um while you know we've been spending years like trying to put

everything on chain and intense effectively so it brings everything off chain yeah can you can you unpack that a little bit and what's your what's your thesis here for how intense we'll shape this space in the next couple years yeah I mean my heart take is that intense will you they're a bit like a I don't know what the nice the right metaphor is but just like a the apple and the tree of Eden like very tempting um bringing everything off chain everything should be faster everything should be better cheaper um and you know we'll go down that road road as well but I think it will end up in it could end up in this sort of being

the next FTX um where we we spend the next bull market everything coming off chain becoming like super fast like the whole world starts using blockchains and only settles to basically you just have this like account on ethereum or you have even you know Bitcoin and just becomes a ledger again um and you maybe that's our future but there could be then some big censorship moment where um you know maybe someone decides that can't act anymore and um users suddenly have no way of getting what they want done done um so yeah I think intents are amazing but the that squid will stay we'll

by bringing everything offchain an external actor whether it's you regulation or like some some external Factor um that has easier access to the offchain world uh would or could uh potentially censor transactions uh prohibit solvers from executing their transactions on chain and users would be kind of like stuck in this limbo they sort of like be frozen in time uh unable to execute their transactions unable to settle um I mean we could we we could also could couldn't we build um mitigation solutions for this where like

a user could execute their own transaction I guess it like if if the if the intense system becomes so complex then it becomes more difficult to do that yeah well that's exactly like you know squid exists because it's so hard to do cross-chain transactions and um we we've built a solver essentially um and we can build an intent Market as well and start involving other solvers but um if all of the other solvers they're real businesses they're really like technical groups they're not just you know single actors who just happen to I mean maybe there will be also some single actors and that could be a nice way out of this um but what will probably end up happening is we have a

bunch of like product teams servicing this like intent layer um and if for some reason they all just can't act anymore then there's no way for a user to like use the validator sets of blockchains to like guarantee that they won't be sens censored like it's it's that guarantee of execution like blockchains nintend are still secure you won't lose your money um but your guarantee to get something done is is at risk um and it becomes I sort of think that like the gas cost of the validator set is it's fully generic at on ethereum or on like any blockchain and you just no matter

what you're trying to do whether it's like whether someone doesn't want you to do it or not you can get it done at this generic price but some things that become more like uh you know there are maybe they are going to be censored by you know the government or like different actors um your price to get execution starts going up really high right yeah that's that's the shift that I'm seeing okay this this um this kind of touches on on on this concept that uh so this other this team that we had on the podcast called blocklist so they're building like this wasum ZK VM um which is really cool because I

mean one of the things that they um that this product enables is the ability to do uh llms that uh for blockchains right so like a blockchain can leverage their offchain execution environment to uh to perform you know actions with an N um operations within nlm and computations that basically come back on chain they're verifiable um but they they've come up with this idea of a network neutral application where the application log it sits uh on this on this offchain ZK VM and they have a model for building like a network of uh of these offchain executions right but they're they're it's a network of of

operators but they're not onchain but this concept of a network neutral application is effectively this network executes the application logic and then Settles uh to to different blockchains but the the application sort of exists in this offchain network you know like I don't know I guess something akin to like a bit torrent right like exists in this um in this offchain verifiable computation thing um which which it's interesting but I it hadn't occurred to me that you know potentially there's this there's this um there's this risk that um these offchain transactions could or these off offchain operations could be at risk of not being able to settle for like a variety of reasons

yeah I think with I'm not familiar with blacklist's architecture but ZK is maybe a little bit better in this regard like depends if you can run your own um your own infrastructure to get your transaction done uh or if yeah it you know ZK is a I think retain some of the nice like decentralization characteristics that you we like about blockchains um it's more just this model of like I want something done care at all um just go and do it for me but you know I it's that model that is at risk there I mean it's my hard take so like don't

take me too seriously but yeah yeah I want come back to Axel a little bit and and we can talk more about um sort of like liquidity fragmentation and and in the space and and how you guys are helping solve that but yeah so coming back to Axel you know it is it is a very unique model I think compared to a lot of the um some some of the other in solutions that that have come come up lately right like hyperlane and Union and polymer um like the Hub and spoke model right it I think uh they've they've sort of like owned that space um you on the scale of permissionless to trust

minimized uh or TR yeah trust minimized I guess on that on that scale like where would you place Axel and in what cases would it be better better to use another solution right like as a user um what are the considerations that one might have uh when when using Axel over like another intop solution maybe something like uh like Union or polymer or or hyperlane yeah yeah I think I give them an I think um and that's that's on a theoretical level though I think something that's missed with like I got into this interrupt stuff because I was so interested in the consensus layer like the

security um models of these different protocols but what you see in practice is that security is so much more than like a white paper it's these are just teams who are building software which needs to be really robust well tested well audited has a Lindy of being used for a while um has sustained like a lot of transaction volume and you know Hub SP Hubb and spoke is a nice example of that because the biggest argument against Hub and spoke is that you you break the Hub and then everyone loses everything and people don't like that idea but in practice The Hub actually red produces a

lot of this complexity which is what causes some of these hacks um you know maybe one of the point-to-point connections isn't as well uh maintained as the other ones and then suddenly the other ones are um the the blowout is much harder to contain rate limiting is a lot harder when you don't have H and spoke because you've got thousands and thousands of point-to-point connections and none of them have any knowledge of what the other one is doing so we've seen that like say when multichain multichain is the name of another interrupt protocol that was and turned out to be literally just the CEO had the keys um but it was meant to be some NPC solution and they they got hacked

Phantom uh which was mostly had multi-chain assets um was compromised and then all of our all the other poter point Solutions like Stargate and layer zero for example had to shut down because there was just no other way for them to contain that blowout whereas axar and Squid we could stay online and the um the LPS of the multi-chain assets uh on Phantom would lose their money but through that period there were still arbitrages and Traders who were like betting on the chance that multichain would actually come back and the assets would reeg and so users were able to get like 30 40 cents for their dollar because we were still running um and that was only because we had this

Hub and spoke model where we could be sure like the Phantom blowout wasn't going to take out down the whole a network um so yeah that's like the the basic model where they have 75 validators voting on everything I think that's you know it's good enough and it's really good compared to most of the interrup protocols out there because at the end of the day all of these things are just validated voting on messages and yeah yeah but but in the end at the end of the day I mean Axel is still permissioned from the perspective of which chains get added to the network correct or is that subject to governance oh sure so the the per permission list in that sense yeah it's it's permissioned I guess the you rely on

their Dev team adding networks but they yeah they their V2 AXA V2 which is that permissionless model she'll be out pretty soon actually um and they have a CM wasm layer where you can drop your own light client and then spin up um yeah connection easily so so that's the Axel VM yeah is that is that live because I mean I talked to Sergey like in Denver last year we had we had him on the podcast and um I haven't found much like I was looking for the docs for that and I I couldn't find I don't know if it's if it's already live or anything yeah no nothing public um it's yeah it's working though I've seen some demos and

it's like that it's their priority at the moment so okay yeah I've got a bunch of connect into it yeah the way the way I see Axel in relation to uh something like IBC is like you know my my analogy and let me know if this resonates with you is like Axel is IBC is like the SMTP of blockchains and people are building clients for it right and there will be different different implementations of it but ultimately we're leveraging like soort of this open protocol that anybody can use and anybody can build upon and axel is like a almost like a proprietary

messaging product right um so you know I don't know maybe like slack right as a messaging I mean it's not not a perfect comparison to email but like imagine if slacka did email um but so it's like this sort of proprietary application um and that's not the say it's not open source and like not decentralized but users do have to rely on or at least like chains have to rely on as you mentioned like on developers to implement uh new con new connections new chains um and there is this Reliance on on the validator set now like you might you might be comfortable using that security model but it's not a fully

trust minimized security model in the same way that like IBC is where you you don't have that um that intermediary whether like decentralized or not like you you don't have that intermediary between um uh between chains to valid the State of East chain so I mean that that's that's the way I kind of like position axar and the decentralized or like permissionless trust minimiz scale um it's but it's like a valuable product like I mean beyond that like it's still like an immensely valuable product and I use it all the time um I'm just happy we have both right we we do have like the

fully trust minimized permissionless Open Standards as well as like these highly efficient uh very well put together products yeah totally I mean axa's come at up from a a point of view of trying to like solve solve a problem and then you know work out the best way to solve that problem without um compromising on you know decentralization security and then that come coming to the more open model I don't think yeah I don't see the say there like cgp as being a or the like interface for how you how you interact with AXA being a competitor necessarily

to IBC um like what how squid interacts with them is um you know there's work in integrating them integrating different models but the a lot of the hard stuff happens behind the scenes and there's lots of different ways of that happening like polymers come in and now's trying to do CK stuff and we have the cosmos SDK which has its own like way of verifying ABC and a lot of the a lot of the work and like the the actual product of the interupt is is not the standard like you said exactly so yeah aor is um is one of those it's it's built a um build the slack yeah build messaging

protocol yeah so yeah let's let's get into a little bit more of the liquidity aspect here um you know because squid sort of Brands itself as a a liquidity router and I think you know axler plays an important role here as um as a sort of like pool of liquidity between chains um you know in specifically at this moment right where usdc uh is becoming on Cosmos what will be the role of of Axl usdc will it will it continue to be useful um I mean not only for for users right

on Cosmos chains but as um as a a way to sort of like Bridge liquidity on the protocol itself yeah maybe what what's your uh like what's your long-term view here for like how Axel interacts with usdc more broadly um yeah well we have it what's what's going going live it might have happened today actually already is we will be able to swap to Native usdc on osmosis so got usdc on theum you brid across to osmosis it becomes Axel usdc you swap it into Noble usdc send it to Noble send it to YX and that's an onboarding layer

onboarding pathway onboarding route which is really um efficient because Osmos has these amazing pools that are almost one: one it has one to one swaps as well which we'll use sometimes um and so you get exactly the same experience as using cctp but when we have something like boost um in the cosmos you'll be able to do a lot faster that way um but I think Axel aren't really like they recognize that cctp is really it's if you want to move usdc around that's the way to do it um um so we've also integrated cctp and you can if you're on ethereum Avalanche arbitrum wherever you'll be able to get to anywhere in the cosmos with Native

like with Noble usdc um in one click using Cycles transfer protocol um in Long ter in the long term it's yeah it's a nice way for us to transfer value across chains and like the whole thing with squid has been Crush chain swaps are actually really um secure and safe thing to do because you're able to swap into a native asset in the same transaction so you never have to bridge and then swap like you never have that point where you're holding a bridged asset you need to get it into a native asset um and you know that's been a really nice selling point across all of our Integrations is

because none of our users actually really take Bridge risk and you know this is one of those examples potentially um it's a bit different here because I think the IBC um collateralized like Axl usdc is um it's more secure but um yeah we we'll be uh letting people on board into Noble usdc wherever they like uh so so you guys just integrated with uh yeah with Noble and and also dyx yeah can you talk a little bit about that and when can we start to see that coming online yeah well I mean it might be it might be online already I have to

go and check it but um yeah super excited for Noble's launch and they and dydx is launch it's just there is I think there's 300 and something million dollars of usdc on their starware um product and hopefully that'll all move over to you know the cosmos so um yeah really excited to be supporting in them dydx have integrated squid into their front end so when you on board into dydx using their front end'll be using squid under the hood and sometimes osmosis sometimes CCP depending on where you're coming from um yeah and then Noble like what's nice what's nice is that it will all end up

being native usdc so you no matter where you're bridging from yeah the the experience for the user will will just be like usdc it's not like ax usdc or some other Bridge usdc yeah yeah yeah it l be usdc and that's actually another thing I didn't mention about the role of AXA USC is because circles transfer protocol probably won't exist everywhere whereas AXA will probably end up supporting some rollups which like they're only connected to one thing um and you need to go through ax usdc to get to osmosis and then we swap and then we send off so you know it's it becomes this kind of Labyrinth but that's what Squid's trying to solve trying to make it so you don't even have

to think about it yeah that's great I mean I think like usdc and Cosmos is is going to like just really improve the the the user experience right like generally across the board but then also there's this big potential to and you know I think in the next few months we'll see if that actually comes to to play right it's like there big potential for lots of liquidity to come into into the cosmos ecosystem and certainly you know have good inability Solutions where um you know users can like one click in app just like move tokens from ethereum over into dydx it takes like 20 seconds I mean that that that's the dream right that seamless user experience is I think

what a lot of us have been like waiting for for a long time and um and and now it's here right it's just like it's it's here it's like it's a mature ux um and it's like absolutely you know fantastic to be able to use it just and it works right when when it works it's like ah it's amazing yeah yeah super exciting to me be doing it so so one of the things I wanted to ask you is um you know about like uh Bridge asset fundability and liquidity uh fragmentation and um you know I I think like Bridge asset fungibility is is is is still a problem and will will continue to be a problem

as long as there's different bridging Solutions so um you know in the case in the case of Osmosis I guess osmosis was pretty smart in like really choosing their bridging Solutions and making it clear to users like which one was a conical bridge I think they've avoided having you know like a you know the sort of like nightmarish list of assets that all represent the same thing but are are just coming from different Bridges and have different security uh sort of considerations um so you know do you think that that the proliferation of bridges will itself create a new liquidity

fragmentation problem so like compounding on the existing liquidity fragmentation problem that exists by virtue of having different domains of State um that that this was would would get compounded by by just the fact that there are just so many bridging Solutions uh and chains can't reason about the the bridge security of each of these assets well I mean that would be no it's not a bull case for squid but if that becomes the worse it gets the more people need us um I mean I think how this might play out I think it's how it's playing out already so we had this like

2021 era where like people were actually using bridged assets and they started getting hacked they started realizing that's a bad idea um and then now what's happening is like we've got more the squid model where you use the bridge asset to get across and you just have this one very isolated liquidity pull which has bridged Assets in it and then from there you can get into anything negative and that's like a really nice place to be and all the different Bridges have that kind of model starting to be set up where they just have way of getting in and then the goes off from there and like they're fairly safe um and now though what is the next step is we've got teams like Leo who we're

working with with axar and neutron and they're a Stak eth provider who have this asset which is extremely like well used across different worlds and it's very easy for them with rollups because there's a canonical Bridge like the the roll up is a bridge essentially um and you use that to get canonical State Dee in these different rollups but then to get to Neutron they had to build a bridge of the's AXA and what's happening is the application is using an aggregation of different Bridges under the hood um so they have axela but they're able to add if axela goes down they can always use their governance to like switch to another

bridge if they need and that's really the biggest issue right like if you don't want your bridge to go down and then you being your whole token Supply across chains is is lost so they have this um this model where they can use an interrupt solution um that works really well and and then if something goes wrong they can the the token holders still have the control to um you know to to social roll back because it's all social consensus at the end of the day yeah yeah that's interesting I so I had um I had Carell from Union on last week and he was talking about I have to remember how this goes

so basically um Union will have IBC connections to different chains and if basically they they want to solve the interop they want to solve the fungibility problem by being able to provide a proof that the assets came from the same place so if they're able able to verify the state of the of the emitting chain um and they can provide a proof to the destination chain that uh the assets came from the same from basically from the same place say ethereum going to osmosis uh then those assets on osmosis can effectively be uh

considered to be funable um but then are until USC is locked on say the AXA Gateway and the Wormhole Gateway like how do you who takes the risk if one of those um you know bridging protocols goes down who loses half of their usdc like it's I have to talk to Carol I me I'm actually drew a call with him so I'd love to ask him about it yeah yeah you should because I mean we didn't go like too much into detail about it but because I think it's sort of like a a novel idea that they've had but but they're but they're exploring like how they can use proofs to to basically like solve this fungibility problem I'll have to go back

and listen to it the other you you ask like what what's the end game I mean hopefully we end up with ZK like ZK is I think actually less secure especially in the short term but in the in the long term we can have ZK has these amazing fridging um capabilities which is like verifying the state of another chain is is one of those running like cents anywhere is is like really powerful I think that's probably an end game yeah what are your what are your thoughts on um eth eth stake being utilized to secure Cosmos chains is it and is this something that Axel is is working on

because like all the ZK teams that I talk to are uh are thinking about this or like thinking about ways to like integrate with say like IG Lair whatever to enable State de to be used used to uh secure Cosmos chains and I mean I don't have formed opinions I would say that's bullish for the cosmos because any way you can get eth users to get more more yield on their eth by doing something it's it's a good thing yeah I think sounds similar to Babylon I was gonna say I mean yeah why would you get e stake instead of Bitcoin steak I guess why not when I get more Ste yeah I mean

one of both yeah exactly cool um so I I have to ask you about this because like so many people asked uh on Twitter or a few people asked on Twitter I think you know what this is it's like when squid token when squid governance token yeah we already made the air drop cut of no um there's no there's no plans for token as in we haven't made plans not confirmed or disconfirming one um so I can't give anyone good news I'm sorry I think um yeah we want to be a decentralized protocol so um we we've just been focusing on the product for

now and trying to make it make something that works get a lot of adoption and um yeah we'll go from there but but what what would a token what might a token be used for in in the context of squid like what what would there be to govern um that a token would be useful for I mean just going through all all the different ideas like you could go with very basic governance token it's a bit of a meme at this point to be honest but um we the governance uh token gives the squid team or maybe they decide it's not best that the the squid team does the development for some of the products

um you could do that you could have purely a token which um if Squid turns on fees one day or if there's another way of Revenue then the token holders can um you know direct that or participate it in some way um there's I think you know squid at the end of the day is a bit of a you know we're a ux tool and there's different ways that you can get your community involved in the product like in developing the product and and like um sort of providing loyalty and sticking with Squid um helping it grow over time and being part of that growth

which you know doesn't have to be part of the core protocol of of doing you know these cross chain routes it can you know be purely um you know a product feedback loop and you can have toomics models around that um yeah all just totally drawing board ideas maybe some of these will make it into reality yeah see and maybe the squid app chain comes one day let's see yeah when squid app chain was my next question so we talk about all the time but it's not it's just like it's too much we're gonna just do yeah so so so you this is another point

I wanted to ask you and you touched on it it's like yeah what's the business model because currently you're not charging uh any fees right no yeah we currently we're charging um uh through busines to business uh like B2B Integrations if they can want to charge a fee we take a cut a revenue share model yeah I like it the most because these front ends like wallets are the best you know they have the best ability Willets and feed on ramps and whatnot they have the best way to actually charge a fee to to a user and um adding swaps is a great way for them to like monetize as well so we just Shar in that we don't have to

introduce any you know like other me fees or other kinds of more sneaky ways of like making money but you know to say we we want cool so yeah what's on the road map and where can people go to find out more about squid and maybe integrating squid in their app or yeah the floor is yours well I mean go into a swap and get into the ydx using us um app. squid r.com is where you can try it out um and then if you're a dev then would' love to be able to help you with on boarding and we want to bring squid to like more

wider use cases while working with stargas do Crush chain purchases from evm into C MOS um anyone who's building up in Cosmos and wants to get like the evm users over in one click and get really excited about those those use cases um find us on Twitter squid router and yeah I'm ecdsa F on Twitter yeah cool thanks fig thanks for coming on thanks for having me man see you