Cross-chain is hard, but Osmosis makes it easy.

Following its recent adoption of Axelar as a bridge service provider for chains outside the Cosmos/IBC ecosystem, Osmosis, the Cosmos DEX with the deepest liquidity in the network, is building more pools of cross-chain assets that can easily be swapped, transferred, and used in DeFi on any chain supported by Axelar or IBC, the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol.

It is simple for DeFi and Web3 applications to integrate Osmosis as their cross-chain back-end, thereby giving their users the ability to purchase and use cross-chain assets on any chain, all within the user interface of the integrating app.

A use-case example for DeFi developers

Let’s say that Compound wants to let its users borrow (for example) AVAX on Avalanche against ETH collateral on Ethereum from the comfort of the Compound front-end. Instead of spending years developing a bespoke cross-chain framework, it can simply leverage Osmosis.

A cross-chain swap could be executed with a single MetaMask transaction.

1. deposit ETH into a lending contract on Compound on Ethereum,
2. contract locks the ETH in the Ethereum-side bridge contract, and mints ETH.axl on Axelar
3. ETH.axl is IBC’d to Osmosis and swapped for AVAX.axl
4. AVAX.axl is IBC’d back to Axelar and locked in Axelar-side bridge contract
5. AVAX is released to user’s wallet on Avalanche from the Avalanche-side bridge contract

Easy Integration: Developers adopting Osmosis do not have to learn new codebases because the cross-chain back-end is handled. The integration work is largely on the front-end, and since Osmosis has easily accessible APIs and a wealth of tooling, Osmosis widgets are easy to hook up. Likewise, Axelar’s Cross-Chain Gateway and Cross-Chain Transfer Protocols (CGP and CTP) are designed to be plug-and-play, so integrators need only link their front-ends and contracts with their chain’s bridge contract. Finally, the Keplr Wallet team, as Osmosis founders, can facilitate any necessary wallet integrations, e.g. with MetaMask.

This is an excerpt of a post that originally appeared on an Osmosis blog. Read the full post there and get started building the cross-chain future with Axelar:

• Read our documentation
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• Clone our local dev-environment repo
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• Check out our series of example dApps
• .