Today rhino.fi launches frictionless cross-chain swaps to BNB Smart Chain (BSC), one of the world’s most popular blockchains: 134 million unique addresses, 4.5 million monthly transactions and over $5 billion in TVL.
With this addition to our multi-chain network, you can now swap assets from an ecosystem of over 1,000 projects, stretching from NFTs to the Metaverse, as easily as a regular ERC-20 swap: no complex bridges, no network switches, no gas. You can even bridge your stablecoins directly if you want to.
The following post talks about what this means for the future of our multi-chain project. But if you want to seize this opportunity right now, no problem: it’s right here.
The whole point of multi-chain DeFi is that everyone gets access to every opportunity, whenever they want to seize it.
In the old fiat world, your bank restricted you to a finite number of products and services, provided by their partners and providing you met specific criteria. They chose when to give you opportunities, and when to lock you out.
If we only give you access to a certain number of chains, a certain number of possibilities, then really we’re not much better than a bank.
So, as a multi-chain gateway, we need to open up as many chains as possible, both the major names and the emerging projects. There are over 1,000 blockchains in access right now, all of them rolling out new opportunities, from coins and tokens to NFTs and the Metaverse. Every one of them offers something unique.
But we also need to provide access quickly. It’s no good bringing a blockchain into our ecosystem when all the opportunities have been rinsed. That’s like inviting you to a party when all the best people have left.
We need to be able to move at lightning pace. In fact, our ultimate goal is to be able to add a new blockchain to rhino.fi within 24 hours.
And that’s why we’re particularly excited about BSC. Not just because BSC is a hugely important blockchain in its own right – but because it shows we can add new chains at speed, without compromising security or user experience.
How our technology works
Our multi-chain network is based on a series of ‘outposts’ planted on different chains.
- We build the outpost on a new chain, using Solidity smart contracts. These allow us to introduce meta-transactions – you sign the trade off-chain and we execute on your behalf.
- Our scalability partner, StarkEx, provides the central hub of the wheel, creating a conduit for the conversion of funds. So you sell an asset on one chain, receive your desired asset on StarkEx, and can use this asset to make trades and swaps on another chain.
This is a seriously innovative structure, because you never have to interact with the individual blockchains at all. You simply make your desired trade on rhino.fi; we do all the heavy lifting for you.
In fact, we think we’re the first project to enable cross-chain swapping without requiring the origin chain’s native token for gas, because we pay the gas for you.
Previously, if you wanted to swap, say Cake (one of the hottest tokens on BSC right now) for USDT, you’d need to hold BSC’s native token, BNB, to pay the gas. However, with rhino.fi, we pay the BNB fee on your behalf, and just add that fee on top of the normal fee we’d charge to execute the swap.
But the other key feature of this structure is that it is designed for speed and repeatability. In other words, it can be applied to new chains quickly.
When we built this stack for our first multi-chain expansion project, to Polygon, the build took over three months: we had to write the smart contracts, and test everything.
But with BSC, we’ve been able to re-use our existing code and add simple configuration files to our existing contracts. This means we’ve been able to reduce the process to just 30 days.
And because all the code is re-usable (no code is specific to any one chain) we’re going to get even quicker.
We think we can reduce the build time to just a week, and, ultimately, we think we can hit that magical 24-hour mark if we need to.
This will allow us to build a genuine multi-chain DeFi ecosystem: layer 1 chains, layer 2 projects, side-chains and alts. We want to add all EVM-compatible chains to our platform, and go way beyond that.
More importantly, it will enable us to provide opportunities when they’re at their hottest. Even if a blockchain has only been alive a few hours, we can jump in to support it – and ensure you get the best opportunities before they fizzle out.
This isn’t to downplay the significance of BNB, by the way. This is a huge step forward for us in its own right. We’ve brought a genuinely massive chain onto our platform and opened up access to one of the most dynamic ecosystems in crypto. For you, as a user, that means huge possibilities.
But for us, it’s not just about where we’ve got to. It’s where we’re going next.
We’re evolving beyond a multi-chain hub. We’re becoming an any-chain hub.
