Osmosis, the Cosmos-based interchain automatic market maker (AMM), today announces the launch of cross-ecosystem token swaps. It's the first offering on the DEX that is enabled by Axelar, the secure cross-chain communication infrastructure provider that the Osmosis DAO has voted in as the canonical bridge to connect with the Ethereum ecosystem. Osmosis already supports swaps between Ethereum and Cosmos-based tokens and will soon leverage Axelar to support the Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, Polkadot, and Polygon ecosystems, creating the first permissionless, one-click application for universal cross-chain swaps.

Osmosis is already leveraging Axelar to enable trading of wrapped versions of ETH, BTC, and a variety of stablecoins that have been crucial safe-havens in the wake of UST's collapse. The addition of the L1 tokens AVAX, BNB, DOT, and MATIC will set the stage for even more exciting possibilities. The beauty of this integration is that users will continue to have the same seamless experience they're used to on Osmosis even as they're accessing tokens from many more ecosystems. The cross-chain backend is entirely abstracted away, so swaps only require a single click.

As it stands, cross-chain DeFi has proven very challenging to implement. Even when projects have launched dApps on a variety of L1s, they've had to contend with the fragmentation of liquidity as well as internal developer resources. Osmosis is poised to remedy that problem by leveraging Axelar to provide DeFi applications with a cross-chain swap backend that they can access through simple API integrations. This will enable, for instance, a lending dApp to give its users the ability to deposit ETH as collateral to borrow AVAX. With the deepest liquidity of any interchain DEX, Osmosis is well-positioned to fill this void of cross-chain swaps as a service and become the go-to backend for a variety of DeFi projects across a range of blockchain ecosystems.

Read the full press release here.

Read an Osmosis blog post outlining the potential for cross-chain "swaps-as-a-service" using Axelar.