A group of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols have teamed up to solve liquidity problems in the Cosmos ecosystem. The teams involved include cross-chain bridging protocol Wormhole, liquidity aggregator Swing, lending protocol Tashi and Cosmos network Evmos.
According to statements from two of the teams involved, Wormhole will register five new bridged tokens for use on Evmos: Tether (USDT), USD Coin (USDC), wrapped Ether (wETH), wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC) and Solana (SOL). A Wormhole governance vote on this part of the proposal began on Sept. 19 and currently has near unanimous support.
Once the tokens are launched on Evmos, they will be implemented into Swing protocol, which will allow users to send them to Evmos from any network that Swing supports, including BNB Chain, Polygon, Fantom and others.
Tashi will also implement Swing into its user interface, allowing users to bridge the coins and deposit them as collateral with a minimum of button clicks. Users will then be able to take out loans of either Cosmos-based or Ethereum-based coins using this collateral, swap the loaned coins for others, deposit them into liquidity pools or perform other common DeFi actions.
According to representatives from both Swing and Tashi, the integrations are ready to go live and are simply waiting for the Wormhole proposal to pass and be implemented. The proposal’s vote will come to an end on Sept. 24, which implies that the new liquidity system should go live soon afterwards.
Related: DYdX to launch decentralized order book exchange on Cosmos: KBW 2023
In a conversation with Cointelegraph, Tashi co-founders Lindsay Ironside and Kristine Boulton claimed that the new system is needed to fix a “crisis” in liquidity within the Cosmos ecosystem. “We’ve got this chain that continues to deliver these amazing opportunities, but nobody’s using it because they can’t get liquidity there,” Boulton stated. But “[Wormhole], they’re on, I think it’s 29 different chains right now […] so it is an opportunity to fix that crisis.”
Ironside stated that she felt a new system was needed after she first began using the Cosmos ecosystem. She had a bad user experience the first time she attempted to swap USDC for Cosmos (ATOM) and send it to Evmos. In order to obtain the ATOM, she needed to first bridge her USDC to Cosmos Hub. Once the USDC was on the network, however, she didn’t have the ATOM to pay the gas fee to make the swap.
According to Ironside, this experience caused her to realize that the team needed to focus on this problem. “Coming in as new users […] and trying to figure out where the solutions to these problems were, [that] was a big deal,” she remarked.
In a separate conversation, Swing CEO Viveik Vivekananthan agreed that the new system will potentially fix these problems. If a user wants to swap USDC for a different coin on Evmos, Swing will convert a small portion of the coins sent into the Evmos native coin, which will then be spent on gas to make the swap. This will allow users to onboard into Evmos using any supported coin, Vivekananthan explained.
In the beginning, Swing will only be able to bridge tokens from mostly non-Cosmos networks into Evmos, he stated, but the team plans to expand its compatibility to allow bridges between different Cosmos networks in the future.
The Cosmos community has been making a concerted effort to attract users with new features in 2023. Cosmos-based chain Noble launched a native version of the USDC stablecoin on March 28, and Cosmos Hub implemented liquid staking on Sept. 13. However, the ecosystem also faces a competitor in the form of the Optimism Superchain, which is attempting to build an interconnected web of blockchains with similar features to Cosmos.