Multi-chain DeFi to boost user friendliness and onboard developing countries

Rhino.fi is the first multi-chain DeFi platform that allows users to swap tokens across chains without having to use bridges.

The protocol defines itself as a “gateway to DeFi.” By eliminating the usage of third parties like bridges, rhino.fi also eliminates high transaction fees, having to use multiple front-ends, and giving up the custody of funding, which is one of the significant drawbacks of using bridges when moving funds to another chain.

User-friendly DeFi

The rhino.fi team believes that DeFi can change the world and wants to catalyze it.

However, “DeFi today is not exactly user-friendly,” says Yanev. “One of my biggest worries is if we don’t make DeFi good enough to use for people, it just won’t reach its potential.”

According to Yanev, the benefits of DeFi don’t mean much for developed countries. But for people in other countries that experience steep inflation and don’t have equal access to banking services, DeFi can be a real problem solver.

Rhino.fi believes that this is the moment for DeFi, and it works to provide user-friendliness without sacrificing decentralization so that DeFi can reach its full potential. Yanev also added that the user experience problem should be one of the main focuses for the community to solve during the bear market.

Multi-chain for user friendliness

A few years ago, Ethereum was the primary blockchain that hosted the majority of the DeFi projects. However, as the DeFi area surged in the last few years, various chains also started to host DeFi protocols. This variation led to the problem of scattered funds, where users have to manually swap chains to see their balances on DeFi protocols running on that specific chain.

Yanev expressed the severity of the problem by stating

“Now we’re seeing about 40 to 45% of DeFi TVL has moved away from Ethereum to other chains. And all these other chains offer best opportunities in different aspects.”

Leveraging a multi-chain system, rhino.fi wants to ensure that users can take advantage of all the DeFi protocols from various chains without sacrificing their user experience.

Self-custody in multi-chain

rhino.fi’s layer-2 protocol keeps track of how much each user has on each blockchain. Separate balances from separate blockchains are transferred to the rhino.fi using a smart contract so that users can have the correct data at all times.

In a disaster scenario where rhino.fi gets hacked, turns malicious, or its layer-2 gets destroyed, users get their assets back on their respective layers and wallets.

Currently, rhino.fi only supports cross-chain swaps with Polygon for now. The team is actively working on integrating Avalanche, Optimism, and Arbitrum and hopes to release them as soon as possible as well.