Swingby receives grant to bring Skybridge to the Algorand ecosystem

Swingby Protocol
5 min readMar 31, 2021

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As part of the Algorand Foundations initiative to provide grants to innovative projects, Swingby has received a strategic grant from the Foundation to help bring Skybridge technology to the Algorand chain.

Swingby’s Skybridge provides trustless bridges between Bitcoin, Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), and other blockchains. It executes fast token swaps using a secure network of Metanodes that are powered by multi-party computing and layer-2 technology. Ultimately, the Skybridge enables users to move a 1-trillion dollar market cap digital asset like Bitcoin into the $50B DeFi ecosystem, as well as supports the seamless flow of liquidity between blockchains.

On December 28th, Swingby launched their first Skybridge which bridged Bitcoin to Ethereum via WBTC. After a successful launch, with the bridge processing over $5M weekly and over $45M worth of Swingby tokens as bonded collateral, the team set their sights on the Binance Smart Chain which is expected to release this month (March 2021).

Swingbys number 1 goal has always been to “bring Bitcoin to DeFi”. To accomplish that, the team has committed to building new Bitcoin bridges and working with blockchains that look likely to become a new major source of new DeFi opportunities. Introducing Algorand.

What is Algorand?

Algorand is the world’s first open-source, permissionless, pure proof-of-stake blockchain protocol for the next generation of financial products. This blockchain, the Algorand protocol, is the brainchild of Turing Award-winning cryptographer Silvio Micali. Algorand is powering the DeFi evolution by delivering blazingly fast transactions, at a truly global scale, with extremely low costs. Thus enabling the creation of new financial tools and services, potential for disruptive new payments platforms, bringing assets on-chain quickly and easily, and providing powerful and robust Layer 1 and Layer 2 Smart Contracts.

The bridge

Swingby will bring Bitcoin to the Algorand ecosystem with the launch of a BTC to Algorand bridge, as well as an Ethereum to Algorand bridge which will allow existing ERC20 tokens to seamlessly travel from one chain to the other. Once the two bridges have been launched, liquidity providers that exist on the Algorand chain will be integrated into the bridges via Skypools.

These 3 developments, which will be released in the form of separate milestones, will:

  • Help Bitcoin to become much more available in the world of DeFi.
  • Help utility chains that are expanding their footprint in DeFi to compete with the Ethereum chain which currently has 99% of DeFi value locked into its smart contracts.
  • Expand the Swingby Skybridge ecosystem, by providing another bridge and adding additional use cases. With the launch of a new bridge, 50+ additional Metanode operator slots will become available.

“We are extremely excited to start building on the Algorand chain. As we have always said, Swingby’s main goal is to improve DeFi and bring our technology to projects that are willing to invest in the development of their DeFi ecosystem — Algorand has clearly shown us that they are willing to do that. We truly believe that Algorand will be a major player in DeFi and we want to be there as their primary liquidity bridge when that happens.”— Jacob Plaster, Swingby CEO

“The Algorand Foundation is delighted to support the team at Swingby Labs in bringing their innovative Skybridge technology to the Algorand ecosystem. Enabling a truly global, interconnected DeFi ecosystem will further accelerate the adoption of blockchain based finance systems. We look forward to a long and exciting relationship with Swingby Labs” — Sean Lee, CEO Algorand Foundation

The new developments mentioned above are the tip of the iceberg for the collaboration between Swingby Labs and the Algorand Foundation, the teams will work together to support more innovative and exciting features for DeFi users into the future.

About Swingby
Swingby is the warp-speed protocol for inter-blockchain swaps, allowing DeFi users to easily move assets between blockchains without the need for a trusted party.

Skybridge, Swingby’s core protocol, establishes trustless bridges between Bitcoin, Ethereum, Binance Chain, and other blockchains. It is secured by a network of node groups that execute fast-token swaps using multi-party computing and threshold signature technology.

Fully battle-tested in live high volume environments with over $14 billion transacted in its recent testnet, Skybridge’s decentralized technology unlocks a new world of DeFi capabilities such as cross-chain liquidity pooling and DEX trading with a friendly user experience.

Swingby will launch its Ethereum Mainnet on December 28th, bringing Bitcoin to an ecosystem that already has more than $10 billion in capital locked up in DeFi contracts.

Website | Whitepaper | Telegram | Medium | Twitter | Discord | Github

About Algorand Foundation

The Algorand Foundation is a not-for-profit organization that has a vision of a borderless, frictionless economy built on public, decentralized blockchain technology. The Foundation envisions a wide breadth of applications being built on the Algorand protocol by a new, broader community of blockchain and mainstream developers. The Foundation is committed to facilitating this innovation in a sustainable and eco-friendly manner. For more information, visit https://algorand.foundation .

Website | Whitepapers | Medium | Twitter | Discord |Telegram

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Swingby Protocol

The fastest protocol for cross-chain swaps, allowing DeFi users to move assets between blockchains without the need for a trusted party. https://swingby.network