On June 3rd at 23:00 Beijing time, the well-known on-chain interoperability protocol Connext announced its rebranding as Everclear and the launch of its first Web3 Clearing Layer. The purpose of this clearing layer is to address the issue of liquidity fragmentation in modular blockchains. Additionally, the protocol has secured $5 million in private funding through a transaction with Pantera Capital to achieve diversity in its DAO organization.
The Fragmentation of Modular Blockchains
As Layer 2 (L2) becomes faster, cheaper, and easier to deploy, the number of new chains has exponentially increased. Currently, there are 53 operational chains with more in the pipeline, leading to fragmentation in liquidity and user experience.
Last year, the Everclear (formerly Connext) team introduced the concept of “Chain Abstraction.” This vision aims to eliminate the need for users to be concerned about which chain they are using. Numerous industry teams are now dedicated to achieving this goal, primarily using a method called “intent.” This method 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 has gained popularity, the high cost and complexity of rebalancing liquidity between different chains, as well as limited ecosystem support, have resulted in a highly centralized solver activity.
Arjun Bhuptani, Co-founder and Chief Research Officer of Everclear Foundation, stated, “To truly address the issue of fragmentation with chain abstraction, we need the intent network to operate on every chain, every asset, and every application, rather than just serving top-tier market makers. Therefore, we need to rapidly improve the cost-effectiveness of solvers and liquidity rebalancing.”
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 all be attributed to a common problem. Market participants are currently managing liquidity between chains individually, similar to playing Player versus Player (PVP) games.
However, from a global perspective, the bidirectional flow of liquidity between chains is relatively balanced. Over 80% of daily trading volume involves inter-chain hedging. In other words, for every $100 transferred into chains like Arbitrum, approximately $80 is usually 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 for the emerging chain abstraction stack, the Clearing Layer provides optimal liquidity and settlement for the intent protocol, solver network, market makers, and CEXs.
Everclear estimates that by combining net settlement with asset and ecosystem-specific settlement methods (such as the CCTP of USDC), their system can reduce the cost and complexity of solvers (and other cross-chain liquidity management) by up to 90%. Everclear is a modular system consisting of an open intent solver network and the Everclear chain. It leverages the technologies of Arbitrum Orbit Rollup, Hyperlane, and Eigenlayer to connect with other ecosystems.
Lauren Stephanian, Partner at Pantera Capital, expressed, “We are excited to support Everclear in its mission to simplify blockchain interoperability. We believe the innovative Clearing Layer will revolutionize liquidity management in modular blockchains, directly enhancing user experience and operational efficiency across the industry.”
Prior to rebranding as Everclear, Connext recently experienced over $1 billion TVL growth and over $500 million monthly bridged transaction volume while maintaining a network uptime of 99.4%. This rapid growth was facilitated by Connext’s expansion to 10 new chains and the introduction of the Restake from Anywhere module in collaboration with the Renzo protocol.
The Everclear testnet launched today, with plans for the mainnet to go live 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, while 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 constructing an open and accessible future, enabling users to enjoy the benefits of blockchain without specialized knowledge or unnecessary risks.
For more information, please visit https://everclear.org.
