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DeFi Liquidity Protocol Squid Raises $3.5M Round Led by North Island Ventures
The Axelar-based protocol connects users with cross-chain assets for borrowing and lending.
By Brandy Betz
Updated May 9, 2023, 4:07 a.m. Published Jan 31, 2023, 4:00 p.m.
Squid, an Axelar-based protocol that connects users and developers with cross-chain liquidity, raised a $3.5 million seed round led by North Island Ventures. The new capital will help Squid add more supported chains and expand the team.
Other participants in the funding round included Distributed Global, Fabric Ventures, Galileo, Chapter One and Noble Capital, among others. Axelar participated as a strategic investor.
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Introduced in 2021, the Axelar network is a blockchain of connected blockchains that allows for cross-chain communications. Squid provides cross-chain liquidity that connects decentralized exchanges (DEX) with more users in a more user-friendly way that doesn’t involve the security risks of cross-chain bridges.
Cross-chain liquidity in theory can provide more liquidity for borrowing and lending activity and put DEXs on a more even playing field with centralized exchanges, which took a hit after the recent collapse of multibillion-dollar exchange FTX.
“Failure of centralized trading platforms has highlighted the need for secure decentralized alternatives. Squid powers this future by enabling decentralized, secure, and simple to use cross-chain swaps,” said Axelar co-founder Sergey Gorbunov in the press release.
How it works
The Squid protocol plugs into existing liquidity on DEXs on supported chains to easily enable cross-chain swaps, a type of smart contract technology that allows for the exchange of tokens between two different blockchains. Squid offers an application programming interface (API) and software development kit (SDK) for developers and a customizable widget.
Squid’s mainnet launch supports 25 chains, including Ethereum, Moonbeam, Binance Chain, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Polygon and a number of Cosmos-based chains. DEXs that are integrating Squid include QuickSwap, Pangolin, SpookySwap, StellaSwap and Trisolaris.
Read more: What Is DeFi?
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