Connext, the leading protocol for blockchain interoperability, has announced its rebrand to Everclear to build the first Clearing Layer for Web3, aimed at solving liquidity fragmentation for modular blockchains. As part of this shift, the protocol has also secured $5 million in a private transaction with Pantera Capital to diversify its DAO.
Modular Fragmentation
As L2s have become faster, cheaper, and easier to launch than ever, the number of new chains has grown exponentially, with 53 already up and running and even more on the way. This has created widespread fragmentation of liquidity and UX.
Last year, the Everclear (prev. Connext) team introduced the Chain Abstraction vision: users should never need to care what chain they are on. Today, there is a growing ecosystem of teams working to realize this outcome, primarily using a technology called intents that allows users to offload the complexity of managing connections to many chains, paying gas, interacting with bridges, and other user experience headaches to third-party service providers called solvers.
Despite the growing popularity of cross-chain intents, solving remains a highly centralized activity, supporting only a small number of ecosystems, largely due to the cost and complexity of rebalancing inventory between chains.
“For Chain Abstraction to truly fix fragmentation, we need intents to work with every chain, every asset, and every application,” said Arjun Bhuptani, co-founder and Chief Researcher at the Everclear Foundation, “This means we need to rapidly improve the economics of solving and rebalancing liquidity for everyone, not just top market makers.”
Clearing Things Up
The Everclear team believes that a number of industry-wide problems related to fragmentation, such as solver rebalancing, the complexity of building liquidity on new chains, the trend of deploying copies of dApps to each chain, and the lack of widespread CEX support for L2s, are all manifestations of single core problem: market participants today are playing an isolated, PVP game for managing liquidity across chains.
On a global basis, however, bidirectional flows of liquidity between chains are quite balanced on average, with over 80% of daily volume netting off between chains. In other words, out of every $100 transferred into chains like Arbitrum per day, there are typically $80 transferred out.
Everclear introduces a new primitive: Clearing Layers. Clearing Layers are public networks that let market participants coordinate the netting and settlement of capital flows between chains. Clearing Layers act as the foundation of the emerging Chain Abstraction stack, powering optimal liquidity and settlement for intent protocols, solver networks, market makers, and CEXs.
Everclear estimates that through a combination of netting and integrating into asset & ecosystem-specific settlement approaches, such as CCTP for USDC, their system can reduce the cost and complexity of solving (and other liquidity management across chains) by as much as 90%. Everclear is a modular system comprised of an open network of intent solvers and the Everclear chain; an Arbitrum Orbit rollup, leveraging Hyperlane and Eigenlayer under the hood to connect to other ecosystems.
Lauren Stephanian, General Partner at Pantera Capital, said, “We’re excited to support Everclear in its mission to streamline blockchain interoperability. We believe this innovative Clearing Layer will transform the way liquidity is managed across modular blockchains, directly enhancing user experience and operational efficiency across the ecosystem.”
The rebrand to Everclear follows Connext’s recent growth to over $1 billion in TVL and over $500m in monthly bridge volume while maintaining 99.4% network uptime. This exponential growth has been driven by Connext’s expansion to 10 supported chains and the introduction of its Restake from Anywhere module in partnership with Renzo Protocol.
Everclear’s testnet is live today with the mainnet scheduled to launch in early Q3.
Everclear launches with strategic partners including Eigenlayer, Arbitrum, Hyperlane, and Gelato. It brings together supporters including Polychain, Consensys, 1kx, Ethereal Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Polygon Ventures, Hashed, OKX, NGC, KX Bank, Huobi, a_capital, Edge and Node, eGirl Capital, Dokia, IOSG, Metacartel Ventures, Figment, Scalar Capital and No Limit Holdings. Ecosystem partners include Renzo, Metamask, Alchemix, DappRadar, LiFi, Socket, AltLayer, Gnosis Zodiac, and Lucid. Infrastructure partners include The Graph, P2P, and BWare.
About Everclear
Everclear is building the first Clearing Layer for web3. Everclear solves fragmentation for modular blockchains by coordinating the global liquidity settlement between chains. Everclear aims to build an open and accessible future where users can reap the benefits of blockchains without specialized knowledge or exposure to unnecessary risk.
For more information, please visit https://everclear.org