On June 3rd at 23:00 Beijing time, the well-known on-chain interoperability protocol Connext announced its rebranding to Everclear and the launch of the first Web3 Clearing Layer. The purpose of this new layer is to address the issue of liquidity fragmentation in modular blockchains. Furthermore, the protocol has secured $5 million in private funding through a transaction with Pantera Capital to achieve diversity within its DAO organization.
The Fragmentation of Modular Blockchains
With Layer 2 solutions becoming faster, cheaper, and easier to deploy, the number of new chains has grown exponentially. Currently, there are 53 chains in operation, with more in the pipeline. This has led to fragmentation in liquidity and user experience.
Last year, the Everclear (formerly Connext) team presented the concept of “Chain Abstraction,” which envisions users not needing to be concerned about which chain they are using. Many teams in the industry are now working towards this goal, primarily using an approach called “intent,” which allows users to delegate multiple chain operations, gas fee payments, cross-chain bridge interactions, and related complex user experiences to third-party service providers called “solvers.”
While cross-chain intent is gaining popularity, there are challenges due to the high cost and complexity of rebalancing liquidity between different chains, as well as the limited number of supported ecosystems. This centralized nature poses a significant problem for solver activities.
Arjun Bhuptani, Co-founder and Chief Research Officer of Everclear Foundation, stated, “To truly address the problem of fragmentation through chain abstraction, we need an ‘intent’ network that can operate on every chain, every asset, and every application, rather than just serving top-tier market makers. Therefore, we need to rapidly increase the economic efficiency of ‘solving’ and rebalancing liquidity.”
Solving the Problem
The Everclear team believes that many issues related to fragmentation in the industry, such as solver rebalancing, liquidity provisioning for new chains, the trend of deploying DApp branches on every chain, and the lack of centralized exchange (CEX) support for Layer 2, can be attributed to a fundamental problem. Currently, market participants manage liquidity between chains independently, akin to playing Player versus Player (PVP) games.
However, on a global scale, the bilateral flow of liquidity between chains is relatively balanced. Over 80% of daily trading volume is hedged between chains. In other words, out of every $100 transferred to chains like Arbitrum, approximately $80 is transferred out.
Everclear introduces a new primitive called the Clearing Layer. The Clearing Layer is a public network that enables market participants to coordinate capital flow and net settlement between chains. Serving as the foundation of the emerging chain abstraction stack, the Clearing Layer offers optimal liquidity and settlement for the intent protocol, solver network, market makers, and CEXs.
Everclear estimates that by combining net settlement and integrating it into asset and ecosystem-specific settlement methods (such as CCTP for USDC), their system can reduce the cost and complexity of solving (and other cross-chain liquidity management) by up to 90%. Everclear is a modular system composed of an open intent solver network and the Everclear chain. Leveraging technologies like Arbitrum Orbit Rollup, Hyperlane, and Eigenlayer, it connects with other ecosystems.
Lauren Stephanian, Partner at Pantera Capital, expressed their support for Everclear’s mission in simplifying blockchain interoperability. They believe that the innovative Clearing Layer will revolutionize liquidity management in modular blockchains and enhance user experience and operational efficiency across the industry.
Prior to rebranding as Everclear, Connext recently achieved a TVL growth of over $1 billion, with monthly bridged transaction volumes surpassing $500 million, while maintaining a network uptime of 99.4%. This rapid growth was facilitated by Connext expanding to 10 new chains and introducing the Restake from Anywhere module in collaboration with the Renzo protocol.
Everclear’s testnet launched today, with plans to go live on the mainnet in early Q3.
Strategic partners of Everclear include Eigenlayer, Arbitrum, Hyperlane, and Gelato, while supporters include 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. Ecological 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 Web3 Clearing Layer. By coordinating global liquidity settlement between chains, Everclear addresses the issue of fragmentation in modular blockchains. Everclear is dedicated to creating an open and accessible future, allowing users to enjoy the benefits of blockchain without specialized knowledge or unnecessary risks.
To learn more, please visit https://everclear.org.