Fig: Squid Router – Sub-20 Second Cross-Chain Swaps. Axelar-Powered Interoperability #498

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Felix your host for this episode today we're speaking with fig co-founder of squid router squid is a cross chain Swap and liquidity routing protocol welcome fake to App Center thanks Felix great to be here we generally start by like sort of going into what got our guests into crypto so would be interested to hear your background how you wound up in in the space sure so I studied medicine in University which it's very it sounds very far from crypto

it's really interesting it's a combination of like really complex systems and you get to work with people but um it wasn't creative enough I thought you don't want to be on the operating table and your surgeon comes in and he says and this great idea last night um I'm gonna try out on you and you really want your your doctor to be doing something evidence-based following the protocol like word for word and so I wanted to try other things I left medicine and I went to New York and slept on couches to make it work and also started to lend to code and worked as a ux designer as well so I worked as

a developer and designer for different startups for a while and I was a musician as well during that time and one of the couches that I slept on was of this like Giga genius friend of mine who works as an algorithmic Trader and he um taught me about markets and how you have all these Bots like fighting each other in the in the market and by the microsecond I was just really fascinated by how similar that was to medicine it's this constantly changing system that you can't really solve per se like it's always moving um and it's also you get these symptoms that are the result of the like wider wider world in the case of markets but in in the

body it's whatever you've been exposed here in your in your environment your diet whatever um so I got really interested in finance and got a job in traditional Finance but while I got while I started that job I also was getting into crypto so I just started seeing these inefficiencies in my day job which could be automated by Krypton I just thought it had to be the future oh yeah or at least part of the future and crypto is also Super Creative it was um a really complex system so it was just perfect and quit my job in traditional Finance to go crypto full-time and my first year out I spent a lot of time traveling and got really interested in interoperability

um I spent a lot of the traveling was particularly to go visit like leaders in the space people who had designed some form of interoperability protocol or consensus protocol and trying to build up an understanding of these things and after all of that traveling I really found my axillars vision and their Founders to be the most impressive and the most compelling for me so decided um at that point as well the squid with met my co-founders and the squid team has started building so we we all decided to commit to axillary and start building on the protocol and yeah here we are that's awesome yeah that's a cool

history I think glad that you didn't become the next Elizabeth Holmes and and made a terrorist like [Laughter] yeah so quite interesting how how the yeah there's the like large systems I guess generally like this coordination problems and how how you can end up in crypto from different angles uh quite interesting so yeah I guess you mentioned already axelar um and a bunch of things that we definitely want to talk about but maybe yeah initially we can just focus on on squid itself and like maybe trying to approach it from the angle of you know what's what's sort of the problem that that you saw that that squid is in the end solving yeah sure so like squid came out of

the experience we were all having in difa summer so in defense summer back in 2020 you had ethereum was starting to get product what D5 was getting product Market fit and ethereum was getting a lot of use gas prices were spiking so and also these new l1s like Avalanche and polygon we're popping up roll up started popping up and every time you needed to go and try a new application on one of these ecosystems you had to do all these things to get there so you needed to bridge your funds over maybe you needed to get your usdc across you need to get gas because you couldn't use this new uh new application if you didn't have gas in the blockchain and to do that you had to visit a bunch

of new websites you often had to click like up to 20 30 times and in crypto every time you try something new it's really scary because you don't know if it's a scam website for one but you don't have the protocol safe and just the user experience in general was it was atrocious we thought um and also we're interested in we're aware of axillar and it's getting more and more bullish on interoperability generally because it just seemed like there was no other option that these Roll-Ups with blockchains would have to form some kind of Internet um the internet of blockchains this night vision that the cosmos has had and so we decided to build something in interoperability and um we started with the most basic

primitive you can have in in really any crypto application which is sending money somewhere and in order to do that you actually need to swap um and so squid is primarily like the core feature is a swap which you can say go from native usdc on one chain to Native usdc on another or you can swap to the gas token you can swap to anything um and then once we have that swap we also built the architecture so it's fully generalizable and you can do payments across chain so you can do say you have usdc on Avalanche and you want to buy an nft on ethereum you're able to swap your usdc on upper Lounge into wrapped eth on ethereum and

then purchase an nft and send it to your account in the same transaction so we want one click for everything you should be able to do any action the cross chain that you would have been able to do single chain and also we've just brought in everything is in under 20 seconds as well something with maybe we'll talk about that later but time is a is something in Cross chain which really hinders ux it's a often 20 minutes to do a swap and we yeah we've done some amazing things to bring it down really exciting about that yeah awesome yeah let's definitely get into that so I guess generally is it fair to say that you are sort of focusing on the layer of like the user

experience more like actually uh and and maybe the developer experience too versus like you know starting to build like an entire interoperability protocol which I guess or like a bridge system which it feels like a lot of the other like systems that do bridging try to do and then maybe that ends up being like too much work and your your sort of ability to rely on XLR for that part is is what enables you to like improve mostly on the ux is that is that fair yeah I think that's that's really fair that's one of the luckiest things that's happened to us so the best decisions is to be we've been able to focus completely on the

developer experience and user experience layer and axilla can focus purely on the infrastructure security um and openness at their protocol so we have this really symbiotic relationship with them where we both have the same incentives we're a lot we're both moving the same direction but have much more focused product strategies than maybe some of our competitors have and that allows us to to yeah reduce our scope and really the whole thing in Cross June is about reducing complexity yeah when I feel a lot of cross-chain models actually increasing complexity where really lucky to be partnered with xlos

so that we can we can just focus on very simple as little things as possible and make them work really reliably and quickly and is it like that XLR that in themselves like I guess how is the difference between like trying to like use acceler yourself versus like using squid is is that just that extra maybe doesn't have that focus on on ux or uh or you just like sort of you are more expert you have more expertise there essentially is that what it is or just quickly XLR is a blockchain um it's Cosmos chain which connects other blockchains so every message that you want to send between say Avalanche with oligon or ethereum and arbitrim

or the cosmos and ethereum now is validated and verified by um the validator set that is on the XLR blockchain so it's a similar method to proof of stake you have 66 percent of the validators um vote that something is valid and once they've done that then you can send a message across chains and what axilla ships with is the ability to send any message across chain so you can call any contract and you can also send value across chain you can Bridge tokens but if you want to do something as a user that's quite limited you

you need to take a lot of steps so you might need to I'll go into how Squid Works this is what we're doing behind the scenes so you have uscc on polygon and you want to get uscc and Avalanche in order to do it without squid you'd need to swap your usdc on polygon into axilla usdc which is Abridged form of usdc and ethereum then you go to axolotl's website and Bridge the excellent usdc to I think it was Avalanche we were going to and then you'd go to a swap protocol and you swap actually your CC for Native uscc on Apple launch and what squid does is it has wrapper contracts around the axillar

Gateway it's called axi Gateway contracts which allow you to automate that whole process so you can do the swap the bridge in the Swap all in one click and you can also add on more more functions like we certainly buying nfts and getting into staking position so I think axilla that's axler is focused on the core security and the ability to maintain this fully generalizable messaging and they're connecting to more chains they're building really amazing in relay infrastructure but squid is more the application layer and the developer experience layout where if you want to add cross chain to your app there's a lot of things you need to do like paying gas across chain you need

to coordinate contracts on multiple chains at once you need to be able to tell the user if this transaction is complete or not because that's not actually quite not that simple in Cross chain you you have to realize that it's click complete on the source chain complete on axler and then on the destination chain and report that in a user-friendly way and so squid solving all of those issues around the developer experience and the communication of um of cross chain which axler isn't focusing on as much that's right that's super cool so you you're essentially building a bunch of these report contracts around the different

like dexes on on the different chains for example how do you I guess you know choose which which taxes to support or yeah what what's it what to build in general I guess because I guess there's a lot right you also said like nft buying um do you already like ask your users do you see like I guess generally where the TBL is or something like that how do you how do you go about that yeah it's been um it's been really simple actually the with the dexas we have connected to Every Chain which axillary supports um which is most of the evm chains um most of the major ones and then we've

partnered with really as many decks as we can on each chain so we have Partnerships with the main decks on every chain now except ethereum we've got pancake swap I think is going public today so I can talk about it um polygon we've got quick swap still a swap and Moonbeam Uber soil Pon cello we've got so we just made Partnerships with these daxas and the partnership there is we'll integrate your contracts so that um our cross chain swap volume routes through your protocol um and you get volume from it and in return you integrate our front front end widget so that you can upgrade your swap interface to have cross chain swaps as

well so we we've just gone on a integration spree getting uh trying to integrate as many taxes as possible and then in terms of The Wider use cases like nfts and sticking widgets I think for now it makes more sense for the partners to use rsdk to build a specific application with squid and we've got a lot of cool developer tools for that but because every I think it's less feasible for us to build fully generic tools for every single application out there like at some point we have to make decision to have a a tool which the partner can go and

customize themselves so yeah that's what we're currently shipping we've got the tools for buying nfts tools for staking tools for depositing across chain and the plan with those is to have more of a Shopify experience where you go to the squid website and you've got this application or product you want to sell or you might have people to be able to buy with crypto and you take our developer tools and plug in a little bit of your code to make it custom and then um you'll be able to buy it by a cross chain using any token in your wallet all right that's super cool so you already mentioned right there's this widget there is a bunch of these customization ability there's SDK API I guess so these

These are sort of the products you you have can you like go a bit into them and maybe yeah who are the user I guess these are essentially the the dexes or the apps on on the other chains Right Said correct the main products we have are the an API which is running a is we've got a back end behind it and this API is able to generate um call data for to generate a transaction which the user can sign to do a cross chain swap to do a purchase and it also allows you to track the status of these transactions across chain so that's the core core feature and then around that we have an SDK which makes it really easy to build front-end apps

and and then these front-end widgets which are react components or iframes and those are for front-end Integrations if you want to just customize it and put it into your website as fast as possible that's your option and the users of these the API um is mostly used by wallets so we're integrated into XD files coming live soon and a few other names I can't say but some really big wallets we will be powering cross-chain transfers and swaps inside the wallet so you never have to leave you can you know this is a huge ux issue right you've you go into your wallet and

someone who's not used to crypto they it says they have avax BNB and Matic and they want to swap them but they can't because they're all on different blockchains um and to someone who doesn't know about crypto that would make any sense so which it doesn't doesn't have to make sense so now that they've integrated squid so you'll be able to swap between any token on in your wallet without even knowing that they're on different blockchains um that's something we're really excited about is abstracting this obstructing the chainsaw yeah that's that's great and congrats on on the Partnerships we said already right that this wrapper contract is different X's now I guess like squid is also sort of the X

aggregator in in that sense where you're trying to find basically the optimal price between these uh routes can you talk a little bit about how how you approach that sort of problem is this something you're like also like how much are you focusing on that like I guess optimizing the the price that users get so we have a routing backhand which is for every request comparing all the dexes that were supported that we support across chains and finding the dust route to route through them and we're also doing that across chain as well and we'll be building out the capability especially as we support the cosmos with daxels like osmosis and

Duality and Crescent you'll be able to route your liquidity through a cross chain to the Decks that has the best price so it's not just the best decks is within a chain but the best chain to go to to do your Swap and this is like a big frame shift I think where the application specific blockchain thesis I guess like takes finally starts to take effect where you have chains like osmosis who've optimized entirely for swapping and they should be able to out compete a lot of other daxes and and so if they can if they have tools like squid to con

effectively compare compare them to other dexes then we can you know they can compete in the in the wider ecosystem for for swap volume um and yeah we'll be doing that as well where we're close to launching Cosmos Ah that's awesome yeah that that sounds really cool so basically what you're saying is because like if you swap probably you're also paying gas fees and you know like these other costs that essentially maybe an app chain can optimize more and then in the end your price might be better than even if there's like like let's say less liquidity on osmosis for a certain pair than on ethereum it might still be cheaper for you to go

through that and then squid is able to you know optimize from that Dimension as well yeah exactly you got Gatsby has definitely a big consideration like in Cross chain generally yeah um but you've also got Mev so these out chains like osmosis and Duality are able to optimize their consensus layer specifically so that you can do an Arbitrage after each swap for example osmosis has the proto-rev module and Duality have some really amazing things they're building you're able to do things that wouldn't be possible in a general evm decks and we can hopefully we're hoping to get some kind of revenue from sharing the the mov from these swaps that we

were out through those taxes and it also means we can get better prices because the Mev which is captured goes back to the user at the end of the day as well right so so you're thinking that like squid itself would capture some some of the Mev essentially and then you would redistribute is that correct or yeah I think that's an option for sure um also got other other providers um in the ebm world Maybe of um backgrounding Solutions so you're able to um be able to do a backgrounding Arbitrage behind any swap on the evm or no swaps and the user still gets as good

execution as they can but the Arbitrage which has created the Meb which is created after that transaction can be returned back to them so it's one of the ways that we're looking at getting revenue for squid but also you know just improving prices for the users right that's quite interesting so I guess yeah that was also something that I definitely wanted to get into maybe where given your like sort of this question infrastructure and like crosstain Mev I guess also like a big topic where a lot of people expect uh yeah there to be a big Market since I guess you know on many on the main chains you have like sort of flash boards and I guess somewhat solved maybe a bit the some of the issues to the mbbs but it gets very complex in the cross

chain world so yeah I guess I was wondering also is squid like something where yeah people like Searchers maybe go to like actually um you know realize cross-chain mov but or also I guess yeah you know your approach so so yeah what is the state I guess right now or like how do you expect it to be to be used or squid more uh just for I don't know the Traders or the people that like buy the tokens like literally the users and uh versus like you know like some sophisticated market makers or something and and they would yeah yeah I think so the me being remaining the crushing space is super early I think

um we're just working out how to transfer tokens across chain effectively and reliably let alone making like complex like risky trades and across different Chains It's still super early I think and not the front of mind right now I think you know I really enjoy reading about Mev and understanding it and there's a lot of really concerning things that could happen to the cryptocus and generally if you start getting cross-chain Mev you start getting centralization of validator sets and you get potentially a lot of the cross-chain systems could start breaking down but I think that's a long way away um realistically something interesting

I've been thinking recently with squared and Mev is um around intense and so there's I know who's been uh who have your listeners have read about this but an intent is essentially the idea that you can express what you want and you don't express how it happens and then essentially the market just gets it done for you it's almost like taskrabbit for um for General compute on blockchains and that's essentially what squid is doing already we have an API which lets you do anything across chain you tell us that and we have this big backhand with massive routing infrastructure which just works out the best route and combines everything into one tiny package and you can get it done so

I think what we're building is is actually really suited for that future with why Mev starts to become how things happen across chain um we've since we're essentially building a solver for intents um and currently it's exposed via an API and you go to a front end and use the API to communicate what you want but maybe in the future there will be an intent Market where you communicate what you want there and then squid can be one of these solvers that is fulfilling orders that requiring cross-chain transactions yeah that's quite interesting and I guess you're so right now the way it works like you are essentially paying the XLR fees for the passing like essentially

uh to the XLR valid validators and and then that is sort of take into account for the swaps and whatnot and then on top you're thinking uh I guess yeah maybe going a bit into this business model idea what how would a squid like generate money is it like I guess you know what's what sort of the options is it like you know metamask you add like some sort of fee on top and or these Mev ideas are is there anything else that you can think of or is there also like some some sort of additional thing you have to pay to excel hours it's essentially just these these fees that XLR is charging or is there like some more symbiotic thing between x-line squid that that is there it's also the squid doesn't actually pay any fees to acceler

it's always the user and currently everything is just gas phase so there's no no fees that are actually taken out by either of us but I think we're really fortunate as a crypto project in that our job is to route a lot of volume and people trade via us we'll be trading a lot via US so this is a very simple business model you don't have to get into crazy tokenomics just you just charge some basis points um and we don't have media plans to do that but um I think it's a pretty tried and true business model that we might take up um something which we've had a lot of demand for is a lot of our partners

are in this crypto black hole where you don't know how to charge fees and they integrate squid and they like oh this is a way we can finally charge fees because people are trading a lot in going in and out of our platform by a squid um so we have refer we have not referral fees but essentially the partner will be able to charge a fee and then we'll take a portion of that so that is going to happen that's being built right now Mev I think is there's um room for that that's how some of the Dex aggregators business models work with back running and and I think the last one is you mentioned gas earlier and we don't charge anything on gas but there could be

um fees on being able to provide really efficient gas prices so being able to predict what the gas press will be in the future or at least taking some risk for that and being able to just guarantee a price for the user and take a cut because of that because currently it's the gas experience and different blockchains is really variable and not not a very good user experience right right another extraction day yeah that's quite interesting and I do agree like the bismol that probably relatively simple if you have the volume then uh I guess you don't need to like over complicate it yeah I I think that's that's quite cool and and I guess maybe going back a little bit to the the XLR

choice so as you mentioned like is there is there some chance of you guys like adopting multiple message passing like protocols I guess one could think that maybe you know some is cheaper or or like it helps you to like even get a better price or um yeah how are you thinking about that I guess currently it seems like quite you know you're going with Axel are mostly yeah maybe you can expand a little bit on your thinking there that would be interesting I I mentioned the benefits earlier why of having one vertical really gives us a lot of advantages we get to focus entirely on what we're doing and it

reduces the complexity in our system so we can shift faster but we had always committed to integrating cctp which is circles transfer protocol and the axler team have also been working with circle and we'll be integrating cctp so that whenever it's possible to do a do a cross chain swap fire cctp we'll use that if it's cheaper obviously or potentially if it's um if it's fast enough as well because with axar everything we can we can do everything in under 20 seconds and cccp that may not be the case so we'll be integrating that um whereas we're integrating ABC

which is you know we don't necessarily see it as a competitive arc's law but it's part of axler as an is a cosmos chain and it's connected to the entire Cosmos fire ABC so we'll be oh we'll be shipping this very soon but you'll be able to swap any token between any chains within the cosmos and also between the cosmos and evm and so that has been technically a similar process we have to integrate a different messaging protocol to be able to Implement these swaps and transfers but I think with interoperability protocols that there's less of a reason to have multiple supported between the same two chains like it's not really like

the Dex aggregation world where you every new chain could just have a couple of devs could Fork uni Swap and to play it there and suddenly you've got like 20 different dexes so you have to you have to aggregate them to be able to provide any tangible experience like any competitive experience but with messaging protocols the core thing is actually just getting it done getting it done really securely so we yeah we didn't want to compromise on that um not I wouldn't be comfortable integrating the other generalized messaging protocols I'm going to name them just because of the security and centralization that they introduce and yeah we we don't want to have the brand

risk of potentially getting being part of a hack or even just yeah exposing our users to that right right that makes a lot of sense cool uh maybe we can yeah get a bit into like how this yeah we mentioned a bit the time right is quite important and swaps obviously you guys are very focused on the user experience and that's probably like I mean after the price or maybe even on top of the price like the most important thing to like you know don't take so much time how do you like optimize it how are you able to like do it in in less than 20 seconds and I guess in general how do you improve that even further is that something that you're working on with

XLR itself or are you doing something there or is it yeah what what it's like the approach there yeah totally just introduce the problem a little bit so the cross chain experience of bridging and swapping is can be really slow so that you'll go to the website you'll say I want to swap from say arbitrim Heath to um to polygon Matic and you click Swap and then an animation appears we've on our website we've got this beautiful anime cute animations which we we've made but you'll sit there and you'll watch the animation for 22 minutes and then the swap will go through and if you're a new user you don't you really don't know if it's worked or not or if you've got your money until that

22 minutes is over the user experience is like is awful and it's the reason for that is the is because of finality so different blockchains of different finality times in the cosmos everything is running on tender men and so that it has instant finality but in the ethereum world ethereum mainnet has finality in about 16 minutes arbitrim has worked it adds up to about 22 minutes overall we polygon six minutes so all of these times they're just far too long to have any Competitive Edge over say web 2 if we want to have a system which is going to be used a lot by normal people and the reason the finality is important in Cross chain is that if the bridge is

going to give you money on the destination chain the bridge needs to be sure that it's received money on the source chain so it's only once that the payment that's received on the source chain is finalized that it can credit you money on the on the destination chain and so that's why we have these 20 minute lags with swaps and squared and we we've worked on this with axilla they've built a lot of attack but we the the architecture is you have another rapid contract between squid and axler which essentially allows a service provider to witness your Source chain transaction as soon as it's been included on the Chain before it's reached finality and then they can provide the bridged funds out of their

own wallet on the destination chain and they can execute the exact payload which you've requested so um and that they can prove that they've done exactly what the bridge would have done in 15 minutes time and they register that against a contract so you get you get your bridged funds you get them executed however you want maybe it's a swap and then 15 minutes later when the bridge funds come through they get diverted over to the service providers to pay them back so it's it's a bit like a loan which has been collateralized by a cross-chain transaction and if you can prove that you've learned for this specific transaction then when that transaction comes through you get paid back and you can take a premium over

that right that's that's quite cool and that these service providers as a this is like you know I don't know market makers or like who are these users like utilizing that is that like something like that yeah right now we're running um max Lara and the design has a lot of similarities to do this intent system that I told you yeah yeah exactly yeah so it's it's very much like the user declares on a chain somewhere that they want something done and then it just happens immediately um and then assert the service provider takes another risk yeah so it it is currently in about it takes about 10

seconds um on average up to 20 seconds down to like four seconds which is totally insane um but we can get it down to basically instantaneous because if you if you sign the transaction and send it off to a different um to the relayer then the relay it can send both transactions on source and destination at the same time there's definitely technicalities that come in when you start to do things like that that's like really aggressive but I think we can um in the future get the the transactions out times down to essentially instantly across chain um is there no reason why you can't provide that service Gene super excited about it's like mechanic language

that that's quite big right I think that's you know essentially also if you think of across your Mev I guess often the idea is that okay how do I guarantee I guess the execution on on both sides uh in in like an atomic way so I guess this infrastructure could sort of help you do that as well which might be quite a big use case um cool yeah that's very cool that that you guys are focusing on and then then that I guess these are the risk they're taking is essentially just okay you get paid a bit later when it actually arrives on your destination chain but and you take like a small like I guess

premium on that right that's what you said okay yeah there's no there's no change in the security So you you're never at risk of losing funds um but there's they can be um the service provider can decide not to fulfill it so maybe you have to wait the full 20 minutes if if they break sub not two Okay can service providers compete among these other between like or do you have to like choose one that like will like execute this yeah you can't yeah so I think that's how we built this minimum available product of almost the syntax system right you've it's you declare in advance you pay one provider you say yeah you

pay them in advance so yeah we've got we've got the designs for opening it up and making it so that any service provider can um fulfill these transactions but right now we're just you know it's it works really well so we're doing that for now right right yeah be pragmatic here and you're already working on a lot so like that's that's awesome yeah that's quite cool thanks that's that's very interesting okay and then yeah I think we probably covered a lot about like the basics I think you know uh maybe some some anecdotes you know I recently read your tweets or like I guess there were some issues with like some of the assets of like other of the bridges

protocols and you know squid was sort of or like X line squid were the ones still active clay you sort of expand what what the issues were with this other rigid protocols and and why sort of the XLR design uh wasn't affected by that or maybe yeah yeah of course so what happened was multi-chain which is a name of another a bridging protocol had some issues where users weren't able to transfer across chains how I go into why that happened I don't know if anyone knows yet maybe they do but any essentially the assets on a bunch of chains were

frozen and you couldn't move them around you couldn't exit as it were like and so what happened was uses the the multi-chain Press fell and usually trying to get out and get to safety into ethereum or something like this and some the really interesting thing that happened was a lot of our competitors people who run other routing protocols but using different systems other than axillary had to stop and the reason for it was that they run point-to-point systems which so the the underlying Network um not squid not the squid level but the axi level is running in a point-to-point system rather than a hub and spoke

system and if you have a point-to-point system then every every connection is unaware of the all the other connections so um say you're on Phantom which all the usdc on Phantom was collateralized by multi-chain so it was uh like hugely at risk and same multi-chain has like the hack essentially makes multi-chain usdc really cheap so it's it's as if you can get infinite multi-chain uscc this is the attack Factor and in a point-to-point system you could tell all the points that you have the full supply of usdc on fatum like UI and you're going to bridge it out to this real chain and and then swap it for real usdc on the other side

and then in a point-to-point system you'll be able to get drain all of the liquidity on all of the points but in the hub and spoke model like axillar since um you limit the liquidity that you can drain to the particular spoke because you're swiping out in the squid model you could only Swap all the multi-chain uscc for axillary usdc on Phantom and then Bridge the axle usdc ifs so that axillary usdc still like at Peg it was still secure um and so the only thing you could steal was this the amount of axle usdc we have in the liquidity pulled on on curve like that and so squid had a really good few days where most of the other protocols

had to actually shut down every chain just so just to stop this attack from happening happening and we got a lot of volume through yeah through Phantom we actually just stayed running through the whole thing even though multi-chain usdc was at really high risk we had you know Traders and Arbitrage people who were were keeping keeping the poles fairly balanced so we got a lot of lower volume that day and it was called courtesy axolas design and like foresight actually play out in a real situation right that yeah that's super interesting to to see that I guess they were also like other hacks where this sort of drain system like I guess a wormhole hack was sort of like that too if I

remember correctly that you know you basically equipment infinite and then sort of drain the liquidity from other chains so yeah very very very interesting to see it in practice I guess because the eye Theory many people can claim many things and maybe it gets too confusing for for many or like people don't even look into it so if you see the it in practice then obviously that's that's great and and um yeah that's a that's a cool cool episode cool like proof of the the XLR um architecture so yeah I guess we recovered a lot about like the architecture infrastructure I think maybe uh we can slowly like get to

wrapping up I think what would be really interesting is sort of um you know the use cases you you guys see I think you're like already talking about the obviously the swapping uh but also you know purchasing nfts cross chain is there anything else you want to highlight on sort of the the use CASE front that you guys are thinking about or that people in the squid ecosystem are working on yeah the other use cases I mean it's anything you can do single chain you can now do cross chain and you can pay with them trying to limit it to certain things just so that we can focus and I think staking is a really interesting one so the liquid staking providers uh lending

protocols and whatever other staking product that is out there you can we've got a bunch of Partners doing this but you can essentially with whatever token you have in your wallet you can get this staking product so it shifts a little bit this mental model from the say you have Ethan your wallet and you want to land it you have money in your wallet and you want to buy this lending product you want to get a loan which is the nominated in E and you can get this API on on that eighth so like I like this interview the Shifting the focus on the onto the

product instead of onto the token so you know all these different use cases and you just have money in your wallet and you want to use the use case use the product mistaken's one uh derivatives exchanges are another so worked with Valor exchange and arbitrum and backing with a bunch of other exchanges um where you know derivatives exchange you essentially need to stake usdc as collateral to be able to trade derivatives and we're doing that across chains so you can move between markets in the single click and Cosmos is something I'm really excited for because you have all these different app chains which have really specific use cases but the onboarding experience has been like if you thought it was bad in the evm world like it's think again like the cosmos world it's insane so hard to get

assets into it and chained to try something and get gas so um I think every Cosmos chain will benefit from and probably with some speaking with all of them they'll be able to onboard used from the evm world in the single click and then hopefully this is the app chain technology starts to get used yeah awesome yeah that sounds super cool I'm very excited for the future of squid and you know what you already achieved in in such a short time so yeah really cool to see like this whole like idea of I guess the modular architectures in a way where many people talk about and sort of you guys I feel like are um

like one of the earlier adopters or something like this where you really like use utilize like the xlrs piece and you can sort of expand on a lot of other things so that's I think a grade like choice you made there and it seems to like pay off so yeah very excited for you guys and thanks for coming on and and Diving deeper into into how it all works and yeah hope to hope to have you back on on every Center maybe in in in a few years when when it's all like even further um cross-chained everything and see see where you guys are at so yeah thanks Vic for for being here sounds good thanks a lot Felix it's fun

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