Hercules Announces LI.FI as Integration Partner
Hercules is excited to announce LI.FI as an integration partner to foster deeper and more efficient liquidity for the entire Metis ecosystem and a streamlined user experience.
LI.FI + Hercules
With a composable, efficient liquidity protocol featuring seamless swaps, staking, real yield, and a launchpad, Hercules aims to become the native liquidity layer for the Metis Andromeda network. Its flexible features are tailored to protocol-owned liquidity, allowing dynamic fees and customizable incentives packaged in a user-friendly interface.
LI.FI is a universalist plug-and-play interoperability dApp widget enabling users to deposit, buy, and invest any asset from any chain into a dApp. In other words, LI.FI is a team of bridge aggregation and interoperability wizards, and they’re plugging their awesome tech into Hercules. The LI.FI widget will be integrated into the Hercules UI, allowing quick and easy bridge-and-swaps across more than 25 chains.
This partnership will deepen liquidity on Hercules and in the Metis ecosystem while improving capital efficiency and UX for users, and take another big step towards LI.FI’s maximalist UX vision.
About LI.FI
After being one of ETHGlobal’s HackMoney winners and KERNEL projects from June 2021, LI.FI has been working with bridge projects to improve blockchain interoperability landscape to greatly improve users’ DeFi experience. LI.FI now aggregates 12 bridges, 25 DEXs, and 5 DEX aggregators across more than 25 chains (and growing). Goodbye, friction.
LI.FI allows users to swap any asset,from any chain, directly into the required asset on the dApp they are on. For example, swap AVAX on Avalanche for METIS on Metis, without leaving the Hercules dApp.
This approach has several advantages for users and protocols. First, it presents a user-first DeFi experience by simplifying cross-chain value transactions. Second, it gives many more users access to ecosystems, defragmenting liquidity. Next, it also provides helpful infrastructure redundancy, further securing networks. Lastly, integrating LI.FI brings significant operational efficiencies for protocols, thus abstracting away complex bridge-and-swap aggregation and routing mechanics and minimizing on-chain calls.
“In essence, LI.FI is the money lego of money legos.”
— LI.FI, Medium, July 2022.
Photo from a 2014 presentation by V. Buterin.
Looking A Little Deeper
LI.FI aggregates DEXs and bridges and abstracts away decisions that would normally need to be made by the user via LI.FI’s smart contract — which always chooses the best bridge/DEX for the cheapest, quickest, and most secure swap route. But, how?
The bridge abstraction is based on an upgradable contract which only needs to get implemented once. It then gets extended as more bridges and optimizations become available. The contract also connects to all the DEXs and aggregators to allow more complex any-to-any swaps. This, then, allows on-chain, cross-chain, and multi-hop/multi-bridge swaps.
The LI.FI algorithm uses all its available bridges, DEXs, and DEX aggregators and pairs, splits, and handles transactions as needed to save on as much gas and fees as possible. This is known as smart routing. The steps involved in this process are finding data sources that are suitable and near to real-time; unifying, mapping, validating the data; and using an architecture that allows quick and effective path-finding. Smart routing happens off-chain at present.
As part of its work, LI.FI assesses and measures the degree of decentralization, trust assumptions, fees, gas efficiency, speed, and other qualitative and quantitative factors. Then, their team uses the thresholds and preferences of integration partners and end-users to select the right path.
Deploying and managing smart contracts on EVM networks often incurs significant challenges due to RPC issues, gas price fluctuations, and other errors. These errors multiply when dealing with multiple networks. LI.FI has developed a custom scripting framework that combines Bash and Solidity scripting capabilities to streamline the deployment, configuration, and management of more than 300 smart contracts across more than 25 networks.
LI.FI’s smart contract setup is a so-called “diamond contract” setup, a concept developed by Nick Mudge and described in EIP2535. Its biggest advantage is that it bypasses the bytecode size limit for contract deployments which allows the contract to employ near-limitless amounts of business logic. The LI.FI diamond contract does not contain any business logic at all. Instead, it gains its functionality from almost 40 facet contracts, 12 helper/library contracts, and an additional 8 periphery contracts that it interacts with (e.g. for fee collection and message execution). A network-specific subset of the above-mentioned contracts has been deployed to about 25 EVM networks, of which 20 are mainnets.
With this powerful infrastructure, LI.FI’s product portfolio features sophisticated white-label B2B solutions that not only allow same-/cross-chain swapping capabilities but also grant arbitrary contract calls for the implementation of advanced cross-chain strategies such as yield aggregation, LP-zapping, NFT purchasing, and many more. LI.FI also caters to the B2C market with jumper.exchange, crypto’s fast-growing “everything exchange” that empowers users to swap from a vast pool of tokens at the most competitive rates available — with optional insurance for added security — and to buy crypto with over 130 different fiat currencies.
About Hercules
Modelled after the highly successful Camelot DEX project, Hercules is a community-first, capital-efficient and flexible DEX developed with multiple tools to support the next generation of builders who look for sustainable liquidity in the Metis network.
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