Bankless - Squid with Fig | ETHDenver 2023 Interview #5

Starting point is 00:00:12 We are at the Axilar Interoperability Series. I'm talking to Fid from Squid. Fid from Squid. I had no idea what Squid was, but when I came to the Axelar event, I talked to the co-founders of Axelar and other people in this space, who should I talk to? And so they said, you should talk to Figg from Squid. So here we are about to go talk to FIG from Squid,

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Starting point is 00:02:54 It also comes in mobile. Check it out at phantom. Now, let's get into the interview. All right, Bankless Station. I'm here with Figg, the co-founder of Squid. Just kidding. I'm not that short, but he's unequivocally a member of Tal-Dow. Figg, how's it going, my man?

Starting point is 00:03:07 Yeah, good man. Nice to be here. So I came into this. Axelar Interop Summit learning about this interoperability world. And I asked one of the guys, who should I talk to? And they said Squid. And I asked somebody else. They also said Squid. So here we are talking to the guys at Squid. So Fig, what is Squid? So Squid is a cross-chain swap protocol, which allows you to swap any token from one chain to another. But it's built on Axelor's general message passing. So what it means is you can call a contract

Starting point is 00:03:32 on any chain, but you can also swap into a currency on any chain. So you can think about it. We allow you to swap from any token to any token, but you can also buy an NFT with any token, you can stake with any token. You can really do anything across chain. And it's all done via Axelar, which is a really secure, decentralized cross-chain protocol. So Squid is an application on top of Axler? Exactly, yeah. So you can think of Axler as the execution layer, and Squid builds the payloads.

Starting point is 00:04:00 So we have a set of smart contracts, which run every chain, and we have a backend which calls every chain, calls on the Dexas on every chain, generates a route, and then we send it back to the user. We have an SDK, so devs can add it to the application or to a front end,

Starting point is 00:04:17 where the route is translated into a single payload, which you signed with MetaMask once, and then it gets executed across chain by Axler. So I've heard similar pitches like this before, especially back in like 2017, the big whole interoperability was a big meme. Not to say it is a meme fundamentally, but like I've heard the pitch of just like any chain, any asset,

Starting point is 00:04:39 what's the big difference about squid that's different from all the other previous interoperability solutions that's out there? Yeah, for sure. So atomic swaps have been a narrative for a long time. The real difference is that squid is modular. So really what we're doing is we're composing existing liquidity across chains. We don't have any of our own liquidity. We just we plug into uniswap, we plug into quick swap and polygon, whatever the best swap is anywhere,

Starting point is 00:05:07 we can route liquidity through it. So there's that sort of modularity. And what it also allows users to do or devs to do is you can plug it into your application. So atomic swap, you can swap from USC on Polygon to USC on Avalanche, but you might not be able to buy the NFT also on the same click. So I think there's been this switch

Starting point is 00:05:27 where we're not just swapping anymore. We're starting to what we had on Ethereum in the early days, of like, you know, these DeFo Lego idea, any app can be plugged into any other app permissionlessly. Now we have this cross-chain. So the ecosystem can scale, whether it's cross-roll-up, cross-chain between L1 and roll-up. You can compose an application with another application no matter where it is. Okay, so the mental model I've had is there's a couple applications in the Ethereum ecosystem. One is bungee. bungee.

Starting point is 00:05:59 If you're familiar with it, that's powered by socket. The other one is Li-Fi, and these are really cross-chain aggregator, decks aggregators, right? And so it aggregates the liquidity across the layer two across all the chains. But I'm getting the sense that Squid is that for the broader ecosystem, but also more logic than just simple ERC20 tokens. You also get to do application logic, passing through application logic. Am I on the right track here?

Starting point is 00:06:24 Yeah, I think you're in the right track. So LifePan socket are also bridge aggregators. So they use different infrastructure providers. under the hood. We only use Axler and the ability, so the benefit that gives us is because cross-chain is already so complex, we can compress all of the hard stuff into one package and give you a really reliable execution and then we can also buy NFTs across chain. So I just did a workshop where I showed users how to buy an NFT across-chain. It's basically the same experience as building on a single chain. And because we're always using Axelar, we get very

Starting point is 00:06:59 reliable execution, the user always experienced this as the same thing. And also we can add Axelar-specific features. So Axelar has deposit addresses, which is this idea where you're withdrawing from a centralized exchange and you can't sign a transaction. All you can do is withdraw to an address. So in order to do something more complicated, like do a cross-chain swap or buy an NFT on another chain, which the exchange might not support, say you're on Binance and you want to buy an NFT on Cosmos and the and Binance can't withdraw to that that Cosmos chain we can create an address by Axelah which you can withdraw onto ETH on L1 or whatever cheap the cheapest chain is like avalanche and then it automatically triggers a cross chain swap goes across by the NFT sends it to the

Starting point is 00:07:45 user's wallet and these are very axelar specific features which you know we get because we're only built on Axler okay beautiful I'm starting to see it and really I think the the theme the meta that I've started to identify here at this Interop Summit is that there's definitely going to be more chains. And this is a content team that we've had recently on Bankless when we talked to Jesse and the optimism team about the super chain. A lot of chains are happening,

Starting point is 00:08:08 even though people are definitely getting chain fatigue. And so it sounds like Axler and also Squid are doing a lot of abstraction work, not fuscation work. So the idea really isn't that Axler is this brand new chain and we're all going to migrate to Axler. That's not its purpose and that's not what Squids trying to do either. It's really actually trying to reduce complexity more than add complexity. Is that about that? Yeah, exactly. Axler's done really well at just being

Starting point is 00:08:31 a messaging layer and being security layer, messaging layer to start with, keeping, getting the basics down. And now they just launched this V2, which you might have already talked about. So you can, you can connect any bridge protocol, whether it's a ZK bridge or like client, fully trustless protocols into Axler. So what it means is that, you know, a new chain pops up, it has its own bridge protocol, which is fully trustless and built into the consensus. Axelah can adopt that as well. So, yeah, we're really happy to be building on them because we feel like we'll get the most exposure

Starting point is 00:09:02 and probably the best security. What's the exemplar use case that you like to use an example to get people's minds wrapped around? Is there one that you have in your pocket to share? Yeah, sure. I mean, Cosmos is a great example. That's where a lot of people might have used Cosmoser already

Starting point is 00:09:16 to get to the Cosmos. Cosmosis is a massive decks in the cosmos that we're working with as well. So you send a message to, on the Ethereum chain, and then Axler has a set of 70 permissionless validators. They all check that the message has actually been submitted on the source chain, so it's Polygon. And then because Axler is connected to IBC, it's a Cosmos chain natively as well, you get

Starting point is 00:09:40 ABC out of the box, and we send a transfer to osmosis via ABC. So you've got actually two interoperability protocols being used. You've got Axelar's native validators checking the chain, and then you have IBC on the other end. and that's just going to extend. So you have ZK connecting to IBC, you have different formats of like client proofs. Other than IBC, you have anything under the hood. But from the user's perspective,

Starting point is 00:10:03 if you're using Squid or even Axelaw with the Xer's SDK, it will automatically use the right one. So you never have to think about it. Yeah, the idea is that the user never has to think about the infrastructure, the chain they're on. They want to use an application and they have money in their wallet. They want to use it, like make it simple. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:10:21 I think as crypto people, we do have to admit that the chaininess that we love and touching the chains is really just for us nerds. And most people don't really want to be faced with any of that. Yeah, I mean, I love it. I do get frustrated, though. Even deploying our contracts on every chain, it was impossible to get gas. I actually had to use finance to like to get gas to deploy our contracts. Yeah, you have to go be banks, huh? Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:10:43 And so, yeah, I mean, that's one amazing feature. I feel like of what we do. We've added this. So when you onboard into a new chain, so you buy an NFT on a new chain, you've never been there before. You can do that in one click, but you'll have an NFT,

Starting point is 00:10:56 and then you won't have any gas there, so you can't use it. And so we have gasless transactions coming, we have an account abstraction, but Squid currently supports the ability to also send a small amount of your bridge tokens and swap them into gas with it. So you can do any cross-chain transaction

Starting point is 00:11:10 onto a new chain and get some gas, so you can keep using it. It's just like more of these things that you don't want the users to ever have to think about. Well, Figg, I think the use cases and need for this is obvious. So thank you for helping build out this world of all this cross-chain infrastructure that we definitely going to need. Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Starting point is 00:11:24 Cheers. If listeners are piqued and interested, where should they go to fall down this rabbit hole? Yeah, we'll follow us on Twitter. We're SquidRouter. That's our handle. Squidrouter.com is our website. Check out our docs. Yeah, reach out to me.

Starting point is 00:11:36 I'm ECDSA-Fu on Twitter and happy to help you out. The mascot of Squid definitely makes sense. Like tentacles going everywhere, right? That's kind of the vibe. Yeah, yeah. Everything around. We've got one thing controlling everything. Cool.

Starting point is 00:11:48 Awesome. Thank you so much. Cheers. Cheers. Thanks for having me.

Bankless - Squid with Fig | ETHDenver 2023 Interview #5

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