Polaris aims to unify the user experience and trade tokens across many blockchains through a single interface. This eliminates the need for multiple wallets, bridges and gas tokens.

Polaris represents a change in strategy for Osmosis. Osmosis is a prominent network in the Cosmos ecosystem’s network of interconnected blockchains.

The exchange has historically promoted itself as a unified liquidity hub for Cosmos-based networks. On the contrary, Polaris will also work with non-Cosmos chains such as Ethereum and Solana and will offer a new approach to handling liquidity.

“We still believe that people want to trade everything in one place,” Osmosis and Polaris co-founder Sunny Aggarwal said in an interview with CoinDesk. “But lumping everything into one liquidity center isn’t going to work.”

Assets traded on Osmosis live within pre-programmed “liquidity pools” that enable users to buy and sell tokens.

This system is similar to that used by popular decentralized exchanges like Uniswap, which means that liquidity – tokens traded on Osmosis and other DEXs – is spread across many different exchange applications.

“Today’s DeFi UX is extremely distributed because everything is structured in a very chain-centric way,” Aggarwal said. Chains often focus on metrics like total value lock (TVL) to attract capital; This results in dispersed liquidity and a suboptimal user experience (UX), the team says.

As a result of what Osmosis calls the “Massive Chain Split,” DeFi platforms often operate in their own microcosms, each with their own stack of assets that users can buy and sell.

Since these asset stacks often live on different blockchains, serious crypto trading often requires downloading and keeping track of many different wallet tools – a huge hassle for users.

Polaris allows users to trade tokens between different blockchain networks without requiring them to hold assets in one place. “Polaris is taking many of the UX and UI components that we found great in Osmosis and structuring them to work cross-chained,” Aggarwal said.

“So you can trade EVM assets, Solana assets, Cosmos assets, everything on one DEX.” he added.

Polaris integrates directly with existing DEXs and liquidity hubs, allowing users to access cross-network liquidity rather than competing with them.

The platform’s “bridge abstraction” feature also enables seamless cross-chain trading, so users can exchange USDC in Ethereum for Bitcoin without manual processes. Additionally, users can track their entire portfolio across multiple chains in one place.

Polaris is not the first platform to help trade assets across chains. Centralized exchanges such as Coinbase and Kraken have long provided similar functionality, but these exchanges completely control user assets – which goes against the principle of “decentralization.”

Other DeFi products have attempted with similar technologies; Polaris will have to distinguish itself in this crowded field of UX-focused competitors.