In March 2020, Simon Harman and the team at Oxen (formerly known as LOKI) found themselves in a tight spot. It was the start of the global pandemic, and they were running out of funding, having worked to build products for three years during a bear market. To top it all off, Bitcoin’s value had just dropped to a historic low of $3,000. “We were staring down the barrel of death, basically,” Harman recalls. It was clear that to survive the team needed to develop new products—ideally, ones that operated in a different market than the privacy space. Oxen’s encrypted messaging app, Session, had just been released; that platform would ultimately gain a great deal of popularity, boasting some 700,000 monthly users. However, in early 2020, Session had not yet become profitable, and Oxen was finding the privacy space particularly difficult to operate in. They needed something new, and fast.
There was one idea that particularly interested Harman and his team. They found themselves inspired by the thought of a decentralized and chain-agnostic system that would enable native cross-chain swaps of cryptocurrency—optimally, without having to resort to wrapped tokens or specialized wallets or complex smart contracts, and with low slippage. Some products were coming to market that accomplished some of these goals, but Harman and his team envisioned a way for all these capabilities to work in one seamless package. As a result, Chainflip was established, and the development of the protocol began later that year.
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