Squid on herrenlos: cross-chain routing as one competing route

herrenlos doesn't send you to a different app for every chain. It quotes several providers at once and ranks them by what you'd actually receive (how swaps work here). Squid is one of those providers — a cross-chain router that shows up as a line in the ranking, not a separate destination. This post is what Squid is, its role in the provider set, and how it behaves in the app.

What Squid is

Squid is a cross-chain router: it moves value between chains and swaps along the way, so a single request can take a token on one chain to a different token on another. It settles that movement over established cross-chain rails — notably Axelar for general message passing and CCTP for canonical USDC — and it can also route through an intent / RFQ layer (Squid calls it "Coral"), where market makers fill an order rather than bridging it step by step. It handles same-chain swaps too, but its reason for existing in herrenlos is the cross-chain reach.

Its role in herrenlos's provider set

herrenlos runs a set of providers — Chainflip, LI.FI, Squid, and others — precisely so that no single one has to be good at everything. Squid's role is to be another cross-chain option: for an EVM-to-EVM (or Solana-touching) move, it may find a route, a price, or a rail that a different provider doesn't. It competes on the merits of each quote.

That's the honest framing: Squid is not an exclusive partner, not the only bridge, and not the app. It's one integration whose job is to occasionally be the best executable route for your trade.

How you experience it

From your side, Squid never feels like a separate product. You enter a pair and amount, and herrenlos asks Squid for a quote in parallel with the other providers, then ranks everything by what you'd actually receive after the route's costs — not by who pays us. If Squid is the best executable route, it's the one highlighted; if another provider is better for that pair and size, that one wins instead.

Where a Squid route settles through its MEV-protected intent path, herrenlos flags that on the route, so you can see when a more private settlement is on offer rather than having to know the internals.

Non-custodial, the whole way

You sign in your own wallet, in-page. herrenlos never holds your funds, and there's no account and no KYC. Squid execution uses a standard ERC-20 approval for the source token (it doesn't use Permit2), so you may sign a one-time approval before the swap itself — both signatures are yours, in your wallet.

Your keys never leave your wallet. Non-custodial isn't a setting — it's the only way herrenlos works.

Honest about the limits

• Route availability varies by pair and size. Squid covers many cross-chain routes, but not every pair at every size. The quote panel is the source of truth for any specific trade.
• Cross-chain settles in two parts. There's a source-chain transaction, then a destination leg that completes afterward; herrenlos monitors the destination leg to completion rather than declaring "done" at the source.
• A quote is a snapshot. Prices move, and the figure you see is an estimate until the route executes.
• It's one provider among several. When Squid can't route a pair, another provider often can — and herrenlos is honest when none can. A missing provider is a missing route, never an invented one.

Try it

To see Squid in the mix, open the swap page, pick a cross-chain EVM pair, and watch it ranked against the other providers. For the provider that handles native cross-chain legs like Bitcoin, see Chainflip on herrenlos; for the deep EVM and Solana aggregator, see LI.FI on herrenlos; and the roadmap tracks what's shipped and what's next across all of them.