Interchain Foundation (ICF) announces strategic investment in Stride Labs to launch Stride Swap, a new decentralized exchange (DEX) on the Cosmos Hub

The Interchain Foundation (ICF) is making a strategic investment in Stride to launch Stride Swap, a decentralized exchange (DEX) on the Cosmos Hub, it announced on April 29.

This marks a significant step in advancing decentralized finance (DeFi) within the Cosmos ecosystem, leveraging the capabilities of IBC Eureka to enable seamless multichain swaps and set the stage for broader DeFi expansion across multiple blockchains.

Based in Zug, Switzerland, the ICF is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting interoperable, sustainable, and community-owned decentralized software within the Cosmos ecosystem. Their investment in Stride is focused on evolving the latter into the first DeFi platform powered by IBC Eureka on the Cosmos Hub.

Stride will develop a DEX optimized for usage with Eureka, furthering the expansion of multichain DeFi solutions within Cosmos.

Serving as a synergistic liquidity engine for IBC Eureka, Stride Swap will support instant asset swaps between various tokens such as ETH, SOL, and USDT, alongside Cosmos-native tokens like ATOM and USDC.

This functionality is particularly crucial for the expansion of Eureka with respect to Ethereum L2s and other chains lacking instant finality.

Stride Swap will provide essential liquidity to facilitate instantaneous onboarding and transfers for users, capitals, and exchanges.

By integrating Eureka’s new bridging technology with Stride’s advanced liquidity infrastructure, the Cosmos Hub is positioned to become a frictionless economic hub within a truly multichain Internet of Blockchains.

This development represents a major turning point for Cosmos DeFi, offering a user experience that rivals centralized platforms while maintaining a fully decentralized, composable, and chain-agnostic structure.

Currently under development, Stride Swap is set to launch in the upcoming months. It will complement Stride’s existing liquid staking features, which will continue to operate independently.

The Stride Protocol will maintain its STRD token as the sole governance token.

Stride plans to implement a suite of DeFi solutions, including permissionless customizable hooks, multichain swaps, liquidity pools, built-in vaults, optimized liquidity routes, token deployments, dynamic fees, and other DeFi primitives built atop IBC Eureka’s multichain bridging solution.

This close integration with the Cosmos Hub will provide Stride Swap with multichain access to liquidity and seamless connectivity with hundreds of chains via IBC, including Ethereum.

As the first multichain service on the Cosmos Hub, Stride Swap will ensure efficient routing and liquidity across all Eureka-connected assets, establishing a foundational DeFi primitive for the ecosystem.

This liquidity layer is pivotal for constructing and scaling the Hub’s emerging applications and multichain services.

Stride will work with Interchain Labs as a key design partner for the upcoming permissionless virtual machine (VM) on the Hub, enabling developers to deploy multichain applications leveraging Eureka’s distribution and Stride’s liquidity infrastructure.

Known for its liquid staking protocol, launched in 2022, Stride has become a core application blockchain on the network.

Stride’s Liquid Staking Token functionality supports over 136,000 users, with a total value locked exceeding $35 million.

“We’re excited to be working with Stride, one of the most talented teams in the Cosmos ecosystem, to create a crucial DeFi primitive: an IBC-native DEX directly on the Cosmos Hub,” said Maghnus Mareneck, Co-CEO of Interchain Labs.

“With IBC Eureka facilitating access to any protocol and Stride providing a seamless multichain liquidity hub, we’re opening the door to a truly multichain future for DeFi within Cosmos.”

“We’re expanding the scope of Stride’s product suite and concentrating development on the Cosmos Hub, the bedrock of Stride’s journey,” added Riley Edmunds, a co-founder of Stride.

“This partnership with the Interchain Foundation is a natural progression of years of mutual trust and collaboration to realize the Hub’s vision as the central economic platform within Cosmos.”

“The Interchain Foundation is focused on expanding the Cosmos ecosystem to create an optimal environment for building next-generation, multichain projects,” said Josh Cincinnati, President of the Interchain Foundation’s Council.

“Collaborating with Stride will introduce essential financial primitives like a DEX and integrate them into the broader DeFi ecosystem. Together, we aim to enable new DeFi applications across chains through Stride Swap and IBC Eureka.”

This investment supports a thriving and competitive DeFi environment within Cosmos, ensuring the availability of high-quality, trusted options like Stride for users on the Cosmos Hub and IBC Eureka.

Stride Labs plans to integrate additional synergies between Stride and the Cosmos Hub, potentially including token buy-backs and burns via Stride’s revenue.

Stride is also considering moving more of its products to native deployments on the Cosmos Hub while retaining its existing liquid staking protocol, chain, and STRD token.

This expansion signifies a broadening of use cases across Stride’s comprehensive product suite.