Why we’re launching our DeFi aggregator now

Because DeFi is in the middle of a golden winter.

Protocols are reporting record inflows. Projects are completing eight-digit funding rounds. In the wake of FTX, traders are turning away from CEXs and returning to the roots of crypto: privacy and self-custody.

But, for all its promise, DeFi still has flaws.

Sure, you keep control of your funds at all times, so you aren’t vulnerable to SBF-style craziness. 

But what about when you want to move those funds around, and explore the growing multi-chain ecosystem? 

Blockchain finance wasn’t built for this. Each chain is an island, with its own code and rules. This is great for security but terrible for interoperability.

Up to now you’ve had to switch networks, which drains your time. Pay gas in native tokens, which drains your funds. And create multiple wallets, which creates multiple points of failure.

Above all, you had to search for the opportunities yourself. There was no single gateway that did the searching for you.

That was fine if you were full-time. But if you were trading DeFi as a side-hustle, you inevitably arrived at the party after all the cool folks had gone home. 

So we’ve made it our mission to solve all these pain-points in one strike. 

To create a trading experience where you could explore everything effortlessly: not just the opportunities you’d already heard of, but the ones no-one else had discovered yet.

We’ve been building out this vision for the last few months. In June, we branched out from a layer 2 DEX into a multi-chain gateway by creating frictionless cross-chain swaps with Polygon. 

And now we’re taking it a stage further.

We’ve created the technology to bring new chains onto rhino.fi in less than a month, and soon it’ll be a matter of days. This means we can add new chains at the point of maximum trading advantage.

Here’s how it works.

1. We establish a liquidity outpost on the chain in question,  so we can fetch the tokens you want to trade.
2. Our partner, StarkWare, provides the central star in the galaxy of chains. It takes your origin asset and provides your destination asset in return.
3. The whole system is governed by our smart contracts, which guarantee that we can’t execute a trade on your behalf without your consent. 

This means we can aggregate all the best opportunities with the speed and scalability of a rollup. Using zero-knowledge technology, we can verify your trades super-quickly off-chain, with math reducing the workload of validators and keeping gas to a minimum.

In parallel, we’ve simplified our UX with the creation of our Explore page, which gives you a snapshot of everything that’s mooning on rhino.fi right now: the best passive-income returns and the assets that have posted the biggest value jump over the past seven days.

And you can view your entire holding from your portfolio page, even NFTs.

Right now you can enjoy cross-chain swaps to Polygon and BSC, and that’s just the first pin in our roadmap. 

• We’ll be adding a bunch of new chains very soon including Arbitrum, zkSync and StarkNet. 
• On each chain, you can explore tokens from the best exchanges, rollups, NFT ecosystems and gaming platforms and swap them as easily as an erc-20 swap.
• We’ll be adding all kinds of opportunities: X-chain yield opps, farming strategies, indices and buckets.
• Add if you want to bridge direct rather than use our gateway, no dramas: you’ll still be able to do that.

But the opportunities we leave out are as important as the ones we bring in.

We know it can be a jungle in DeFi. With so many cynical actors out there, it can be hard to distinguish the genuine projects from the scams and shit coins.

So before we add any new opportunity, we’ll do our research. We’ll find out about the leaders, the airdrops, the governance tokens and everything else that separates good projects from bad.

You can rest easy in the knowledge that if it’s on rhino.fi, it’s legit. That someone else has done the background checks, so you don’t have to.

And, of course, you can go everywhere with the certainty of total self-custody.

Our smart contracts provide protections that human oversight never could. With rhino.fi, we can’t make transactions on your behalf unless you explicitly tell us to do so. 

That’s not in our rules, or in our ethics. It’s in our code.

Ok, now you know how our DeFi aggregator works, why not try it out?

If you’re reading this post, there’s a good chance you’ve explored DeFi through our platform before. But, if not, there’s never been a better time to start.