Swim: seamlessly connecting capital across chains with an innovative native asset bridging solution

3 min readAug 1, 2022

Introducing Swim Protocol

Swim is a multichain AMM for native assets, designed to make bridging as easy as possible. Swim eliminates the need for wrapped assets by allowing users to swap from a native asset on one chain to a native asset on any other supported chain. With features such as bridging status overviews and retry/resume functionality, Swim’s solution reduces the pain points faced by users when performing cross-chain transactions.

Swim currently supports native stablecoin swaps across Solana, Ethereum, BNB Chain, Avalanche, Polygon, Fantom and, of course, Aurora. With Swim’s expansion to Aurora comes three new metapools to support native $USDC, $USDT, and $USN. Through these new metapools, Swimmers can now seamlessly swap their assets on Aurora with any native stablecoin in the existing hexapool & metapools i.e., $USDC, $USDT on Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche & Polygon, as well as $USDT and $BUSD on BNB Chain.

How does it work?

Swim is built on top of Wormhole, a bridge focused on security and decentralization by entrusting a subset of Solana nodes as Guardians. Swim uses cross-chain liquidity pools to provide bridging for native assets across seven blockchains, with many more assets and blockchains in the pipeline.

Swim’s main signature hexapool provides liquidity for six stablecoins across the Solana, BNB, and Ethereum blockchains. The LP token of this hexapool, $swimUSD, is used to further provide liquidity in metapools with other stablecoins, allowing seamless swapping between assets in all metapools and the hexapool. The metapool model means existing LP token holders ($swimUSD) are not affected by the new metapool if they don’t add liquidity to it.

As we trend towards a multichain future, liquidity will be split across the different chains. With traditional bridges adding wrapped tokens to the fray, liquidity gets even more fragmented. Native assets are valuable in that they are the true source of liquidity, and by providing a seamless bridge for native assets, Swim allows users to tap into this liquidity.

Why Aurora?

Aurora is a huge milestone for Swim. As the EVM smart-contract platform that works on top of NEAR, a blockchain with fast, secure, and infinitely scalable transactions (thanks to Nightshade, a unique sharded protocol design), integrating Aurora allows many Swimmers access to liquidity on an innovative blockchain.

With over 150 projects built on Aurora, Swim is extremely excited to support the thriving ecosystem by offering an easy-to-use native asset route connecting Aurora to other leading chains. As Aurora continues to grow, Swim will look to partner and integrate with leading projects within the ecosystem to help enable their multichain capabilities.

What’s next for Swim?

Swim isnot just resting on its laurels. The next stop for Swim is further expansion to other chains, including the Polkadot ecosystem, adding more and more liquidity to the Swim ecosystem.

Swim’s very own relayer, the Propeller, will allow for seamless single-click swapping between chains, cutting the number of user approvals required. This will also go hand-in-hand with the integration of Swim into other protocols alongside official partnerships.

Swim’s team is also always continuing to make UX enhancements to take it to the next level!

About Aurora

Aurora is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) based on the layer 1 proof-of-stake blockchain NEAR Protocol. Aurora provides a solution for developers to deploy their apps on an Ethereum-compatible, high-speed, scalable, and future-proof platform with low transaction costs for their users.