Crypto Startup LI.FI Spins Up Bridge, DEX Aggregator

DENVER — Crypto trading aggregator LI.FI has rolled out a token bridge and decentralized exchange aggregator that the startup’s founder said reduces the cost of moving crypto assets across chains.

The platform, jumper.exchange, traverses a bevy of trading venues as well as bridging to find the cheapest and fastest path to swap tokens and blockchains. It works across much of the Ethereum Virtual Machine ecosystem and plans to go further, CEO Philipp Zentner said in an interview.

While there are already plenty of bridge aggregators and DEX aggregators out there, Zentner said that “the user journey is just not good.” LI.FI’s combined platform is a noncustodial setup that doesn’t introduce more risk into the equation and in fact vets bridges and decentralized exchanges to make sure they’re safe to use, according to Zentner.

“We take off that huge research overhead you have as a user to navigate across the 70 bridges that are out there – so many bridging projects and new ones coming up,” Zentner said. “And they all have different security models, trust assumptions, attack vectors. It's just hard to really go deep enough in the details to understand them and to make your own decision.”

Zentner said LI.FI does not charge a fee for retail users. “We are first and foremost a B2B company,” he said, explaining LI.FI provides APIs to other companies. The new retail-facing bridge and swap aggregator is free, he said. An API allows a third party to use a standard programming call to access data on a given platform.

“We tried to get this week to $100 million in volume,” Zentner said here during the ETHDenver conference. He wasn’t sure where the startup’s numbers landed, but said performance was strong.