Axelar cross-chain transaction growth after Squid router v2 launch

Squid uses $3.5 million in seed funding from North Island Ventures, Fabric Ventures, Galileo, Chapter One, and Node Capital to facilitate cross-chain swaps. Axelar also participated in this seed round as a strategic investor. The protocol supports 25 blockchains, including EVM and Cosmos chains. Integrations include DEXs such as QuickSwap, Pangolin, SpookySwap, StellaSwap, and Trisolaris, along with wallets like Ledger and BitKeep. Blockchain.com uses Axelar and Squid to allow asset trades between Ethereum Mainnet, Polygon, Arbitrum, and BNB Smart Chain. You already know that liquidity fragmentation makes these single-click swaps necessary. I see these integrations as the main driver for Squid’s reach. The Squid team has experience with the Axelar Developer Grants cohort. Angels included Waikit Lau, Stani Kulechov, Zaki Manian, Dean Eigenmann, 7, and Ashleigh Schap. Squid received four audits from Ackee Blockchain and Consensys Diligence. Squid offers the easiest path for onboarding to new Cosmos chains from any ecosystem. Users can use Squid to buy NFTs on any chain with any asset, deposit into a margin account on a decentralized derivatives exchange, build payments to any chain, or turn wallets chain-agnostic.

Squid uses a multi-protocol approach to route transactions. It uses Circle’s CCTP for USDC transfers between Noble and networks like Avalanche, Arbitrum, Ethereum, and Optimism. For the Cosmos ecosystem, it uses IBC and the Packet-Forward Middleware to access liquidity on platforms like Osmosis. Squid also uses Chainflip for native swaps to and from Bitcoin and Solana. Axelar provides the General Message Passing for other connections. Axelar uses 75+ validators and a hub-and-spoke model to isolate issues on specific blockchains. The Axelar Virtual Machine, built on Cosmwas, provides tools like the Interchain Token Service and Interchain Maestro. The Cross-Chain Gateway Protocol provides the interface for application contracts to interact with contracts on other chains via a group of decentralized node-runners. Validators use quadratic-weighted voting to reach consensus on message validity. Axelar’s Interchain Amplifier is a toolkit that allows developers to connect new blockchains to the Axelar network.

Integrators can pass a collectFees object to the SDK to take a cut of every transaction. Squid takes 50% of any fees an integrator collects. Most fees settle in the bridge token, usually axlUSDC. Axelar’s security relies on AXL staking and provides rate-limit protection on ERC-20 contracts.

The June 2026 exploit on Secret Network shows the vulnerability of connected contracts. An attacker exploited a flaw in a Secret-side ICS-20 bridge contract, which was connected to Axelar, and stole $4.67 million after minting unbacked tokens using fabricated inbound transfer states. The attacker began abusing the vulnerability on June 10, 2026, and the loss surfaced on June 17, 2026, when a legitimate transfer failed because the bridge’s custody account no longer had sufficient funds. Axelar stated they did not develop or maintain the exploited contract. I find the fact that this contract had been deployed since early 2023 without an external audit to be a massive failure in governance. Assets moved through Osmosis and Ethereum to reach centralized venues like KuCoin, ChangeNow, and HitBTC. The attacker converted the minted assets into more liquid tokens and routed proceeds outward from June 10 to June 17, 2026. The attacker swapped the proceeds into ETH using CoW Protocol after bridging the funds. Will the industry adopt more economic monitoring to prevent these silent drains? The price of AXL fell from $0.84 in January 2023 to $0.1575 in October 2025.