By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 26th, 2024
PolyChain Capital led the $4 million funding round for Squid, with participation from several others, to support the company’s blockchain expansion.
Cross-chain infrastructure firm Squid has announced it raised $4 million in strategic funding to support its plan for expansion across supported chains. The platform also intends to use the funds to integrate deeper with more decentralized applications (dApps). This integration will improve user interactions with these dApps by enabling deposits into DeFi (decentralized finance) positions, and acquiring NFT collectibles. In addition, the integration will extend into in-game items for relevant applications.
Squid Funding to Further Interoperability
San Francisco-based crypto and blockchain investment firm Polychain Capital led the Squid funding round. Participation came from several others, including Nomad Capital, Chorus One, North Island Ventures, Breed, Maelstrom, The Department of XYZ, Typhon Ventures, and Binary Builders.
Squid is a platform that supports more than 60 chains, allowing users to securely swap thousands of tokens across the network. The platform is Cosmos and EVM compatible, and there are hopes it can continue adding more support for chains in these ecosystems.
According to Squid Co-Founder Christina Rud, the aim is interoperability. Rud said:
“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.”
Squid already allows users to buy NFTs, swap tokens, and combine several other options in a few clicks. According to Co-Founder Fig, the plan is to simplify the application of blockchain technology, making it easy for people to understand and use. The press release explains that while Web3 applications are becoming more capable, there is still a high entry barrier. In many cases, only people willing to scale technical hurdles are able to enjoy these services.
Consequently, the Squid team hopes to make cross-chain action as easy as transacting on a single chain. According to the company, the funds will help with development, creating more complex transaction sequences, and building integrations with more networks so that Squid supports more blockchains beyond Ethereum and Cosmos.
Squid and Boost
Squid functions by tapping into existing liquidity on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) that already support specific chains. This helps to facilitate cross-chain swaps without liquidity concerns. Since launching early last year, the company has successfully hosted more than 200,000 users. Also, Squid has handled over 500,000 transactions worth over $950 million.
The process of swapping these tokens between chains started out quite slow, taking up to 60 minutes in some cases. However, Squid launched a new Boost feature to significantly boost transaction speed. At launch, the goal was to complete all swaps within one minute or as quickly as two seconds. However, it was announced that Boost only works for transactions less than $20,000.
Fig explained that Boost is a layer that enables service providers to bridge the transactions out of their own inventory, like a loan. This process completes the swap immediately “and then when the bridge comes through 20 minutes later, it pays back the service provider instead of now sending to the user again.”
