Squid – a cross-chain do-anything router – announced $4 million in strategic funding led by Polychain Capital with participation from Nomad Capital, North Island Ventures, Maelstrom, Chorus One, The Department of XYZ, Breed, Binary Builders, and Typhon Ventures, along with follow-on investments from Distributed Global, Fabric Ventures, Node Capital, and Chapter One.
Squid established itself as the fastest and most secure way to swap tokens across blockchains, empowering users of thousands of assets on over 60 chains.
This funding round enables the team to continue its expansion in supporting chains in the EVM and Cosmos ecosystems and beyond. And the team will build deeper integrations with more decentralized applications (dApps), allowing users to easily interact with those applications in various ways, including depositing into DeFi positions, purchasing NFT collectibles and in-game items, etc.
Squid rapidly grew in its first year, facilitating over 500,000 cross-chain token swaps, LP deposits, and NFT purchases, representing over $950M in volume for over 200,000 users. And the one-click flow for taking these cross-chain actions offers a dramatic improvement over clunky, frustrating experiences when interacting with blockchain bridges and multiple application interfaces. In pursuit of further optimized UX, the team launched Squid Boost, a novel system that brings cross-chain swap times under 20 seconds without reducing security for users.
Web3 applications are becoming increasingly capable and diverse, but the barrier to accessing them remains high, with only a dedicated subset of users willing to surmount a number of technical hurdles to use them. And Squid is playing a key role in alleviating that complexity in one of the most user-challenging parts of the space–moving between blockchains.
This team is dedicated to making cross-chain actions feel just as simple and be just as secure as doing things on a single blockchain. And this frees developers to harness the power of specialization among different chains to deliver users the best possible experiences.
With this funding round, Squid will accelerate development to enable more complex bundling of transaction sequences and more efficient routing of assets. And the team is building integrations with more interoperability networks and has its sights set on bringing Squid to more blockchain ecosystems beyond Ethereum and Cosmos.
KEY QUOTES:
“Our vision for Squid is to create the UX layer for interoperability among blockchains and the apps built on them. Like servers on the internet, blockchains are proliferating, and Squid is unifying that landscape, allowing apps to operate across chains with ease and users to have delightful, frictionless Web3 experiences.”
– Christina Rud, Co-Founder of the protocol
“We’re proud to support the team building Squid as they enable compelling cross-chain experiences by making interoperability among blockchains intelligent and powerful. In making complex cross-chain activities frictionless, Squid is unlocking the design space for application developers, allowing them to escape the confines of siloed blockchains.”
– Olaf Carlson-Wee, founder of Polychain Capital
“Squid is designed as a general-purpose cross-chain router, and we’re excited to build support for a wide variety of activities. Already with Squid you can swap tokens, you can purchase NFTs, and you can even combine actions, like swapping assets and depositing into DeFi protocols, in a single click. Step by step, this is how we enable better application experiences and abstract away the complexity of the underlying blockchain infrastructure.”
– Co-Founder Fig
