Introducing Catalyst
Every asset, every chain, all at once.
Today we unveil Catalyst, the cross-chain liquidity layer for modular chains. With Catalyst, any new modular chain can use Catalyst to permissionlessly connect liquidity and swap with hubs like Ethereum and Cosmos.
We’re also grateful to be supported by industry veterans, raising $4.2M in funding—led by Spartan Group with participation from Robot Ventures, Maven11, Polygon Ventures, Alchemy Ventures, Hashkey, Circle Ventures, Superscrypt, among others. This funding will help us grow our team, build out integrations with Rollup-as-a-Service projects, support developers with middleware tooling, and bring our vision of a permissionless global liquidity layer to life.
To celebrate, we’re opening the waitlist for our alpha: waitlist.catalyst.exchange
A Looming Problem
The future will have millions of chains—enabled by the modular blockchain stack.
What was once a nascent idea proposed by Celestia over a year ago, the modular blockchain thesis has become a consensus borderline certainty within the crypto community. As a result, it becomes easier and eventually trivial to stand up a new modular execution layer — leveraging the shared security of another settlement and/or data availability layer.
Moreover, blockchains are becoming highly customisable through the advent of Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) projects. Over time, it becomes intuitive for an application protocol to live in their own optimised environment.
In the end, each application will have their own dedicated instance, as their own modular chain.
However, in this world, infrastructure breaks. We lose the magic of crypto: composability, openness, and permisionlessness.
- Connectivity and composability is lost when moving away from a shared state machine
- Existing infrastructure like RPC endpoints, block explorers, and wallets don’t work off the shelf, and running the infra on your own is cost intensive.
- Liquidity is fragmented, and a community needs to be built from the ground up. There’s no network efforts to inherit from an underlying base chain.
We need more cross-chain primitives that are built for the scale of the millions of modular chains of the future—with liquidity being the most important the missing piece.
Hello Catalyst
Catalyst is cross-chain liquidity built from the ground-up for the future of millions of modular chains.
Catalyst allows any chain’s liquidity to permissionlessly connect to that of another chain. As a result, new app-specific chains can automatically move transfer to and from any other chain from Day 1.
Catalyst works by being lightweight and extensible enough to live on any chain—irrespective of virtual machine, consensus mechanism, etc. Catalyst uses a concept called unit of liquidity to allow for universal comprehension between any Catalyst smart contract on any chain. As a result, any chain that integrates Catalyst can automatically move value to/from any other Catalyst-enabled chain.
Our goals:
- No gatekeeping. Allow any chain to move value to another chain from Day 1.
- Superior UX. Interact with any asset on any chain.
- Safe by design. Simple protocol design built on trust-minimised infrastructure to ensure the highest level of security.
Our Journey Forward
Catalyst has a vision for a global liquidity layer for all chains—available automatically at launch.
We're building for a future where developers are empowered to create the perfect chain that is best suited for their needs—and connect them to the broader crypto ecosystem. With Catalyst, the multi-chain future is an open future—where economic trade is borderless.
Catalyst is currently under development—join the waitlist to be the first to know when our testnet and mainnet are shipped: waitlist.catalyst.exchange.
Over the next few months, we’ll be focusing on releasing our whitepaper and Catalyst testnet, bringing the power of permissionless liquidity to the Cosmos ecosystem. Shortly after, Catalyst will expand to the Ethereum ecosystem, servicing alternative L1 blockchains as well as L2 rollups. To stay up to date, follow our progress on Twitter.
Goodbye chains. Hello Catalyst.