Connext rebrands to Everclear, launches first settlement layer to address liquidity fragmentation

At 23:00 on June 3rd, Beijing time, Connext, a well-known on-chain interoperability protocol, announced that it would be renamed Everclear and launched the first Web3 Clearing Layer, which aims to solve the liquidity fragmentation problem of modular blockchains. The protocol also reached a private transaction with Pantera Capital to obtain $5 million in financing to diversify its DAO organization.

Fragmentation of modular blockchains

As L2 becomes faster, cheaper, and easier to launch than ever before, the number of new chains has grown exponentially, with 53 currently operational and more on the way, leading to fragmentation in liquidity and user experience.

Last year, the Everclear (formerly Connext) team proposed the vision of "Chain Abstraction": users don't need to care which chain they are using. Currently, more and more teams in the industry are committed to achieving this goal, and mainly use a method called "intent" to allow users to transfer multi-chain operations, gas fee payments, cross-chain bridge interactions, and related cumbersome user experiences to third-party service providers - "solvers".

Although cross-chain intentions are gradually gaining popularity, solving activities face high centralization issues due to the high cost and complexity of rebalancing liquidity between different chains and the limited number of supported ecosystems.

Arjun Bhuptani, co-founder and chief researcher at Everclear Foundation, said, “For chain abstraction to truly solve the fragmentation problem, we need the ‘intention’ network to work on every chain, every asset, and every application, not just for the top market makers, so we need to quickly improve the economics of ‘solving’ and rebalancing liquidity.”

Solve the problem

The Everclear team believes that many issues related to fragmentation in the industry, such as solver rebalancing, liquidity building of new chains, the trend of deploying DApp branches on each chain, and the lack of CEX support on L2, can be attributed to one overall problem: today's market participants are like a lone warrior managing inter-chain liquidity, just like playing a PVP (Player versus Player) game.

However, on a global scale, the bidirectional flow of interchain liquidity is fairly balanced on average, with more than 80% of daily volume being hedged between chains. In other words, for every $100 transferred into chains like Arbitrum each day, typically $80 is transferred out.

Everclear introduces a new primitive: the Clearing Layer. The Clearing Layer is a public network that allows market participants to coordinate capital flows and net settlements between chains. The Clearing Layer serves as the foundation for an emerging chain abstraction stack, providing optimal liquidity and settlement for intent protocols, solver networks, market makers, and CEXs.

Everclear estimates that their system can reduce the cost and complexity of solving (and other cross-chain liquidity management) by up to 90% by combining netting and integrating into asset and ecosystem specific settlement methods (such as CCTP for USDC). Everclear is a modular system consisting of an open intent solver network and the Everclear chain; based on Arbitrum Orbit Rollup, leveraging Hyperlane and Eigenlayer’s technology to connect with other ecosystems.

“We are excited to support Everclear’s mission to simplify blockchain interoperability,” said Lauren Stephanian, Partner at Pantera Capital. “We believe the first-of-its-kind Clearing Layer will transform how liquidity is managed on modular blockchains, directly improving user experience and operational efficiency across the industry.”

Prior to rebranding to Everclear, Connext recently grew to over $1 billion in TVL and bridged over $500 million in monthly transaction volume while maintaining 99.4% network uptime. This rapid growth was driven by Connext’s expansion to 10 new chains and the introduction of the Restake from Anywhere module in partnership with the Renzo protocol.

Everclear’s testnet went live today, with the mainnet scheduled to go live in early Q3.

Everclear’s strategic partners include Eigenlayer, Arbitrum, Hyperlane and Gelato; supporters include Polychain, Consensys, 1kx, Ethereal Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Polygon Ventures, Hashed, OKX, NGC, KX Bank, Huobi, a_capital, Edge and Node, eGirl Capital, Dokia, IOSG, Metacartel Ventures, Figment, Scalar Capital and No Limit Holdings; ecosystem partners include Renzo, Metamask, Alchemix, DappRadar, LiFi, Socket, AltLayer, Gnosis Zodiac and Lucid; infrastructure partners include The Graph, P2P and BWare.

About Everclear

Everclear is building the first Web3 Clearing Layer. Everclear solves the fragmentation problem of modular blockchains by coordinating global liquidity settlements across chains. Everclear is committed to building an open and accessible future that enables users to enjoy the benefits of blockchain without expertise or unnecessary risk.

For more information, visit https://everclear.org