Caddi: Swap, Bridge, & Chat on any Dapp

GM, GM everybody. Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast for builders in the Web3 community to showcase what they've built. This can be a cool weekend project you built, a cool startup that you're running, or anything in between.

And today I'm ecstatic to welcome Vitor Py and Jaimin Patel from Caddi. So if you didn't know, Caddi is an extension injecting a bridge on every website. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll learn what Caddi is, the challenges of implementing a good UX across multiple chains, how you can get started with Caddi, and some alpha the team has for us today. So let's get into it.

Hey, GM, GM. Welcome to the show Vitor and Jaimin. Happy to have you on.

GM, GM. How's it going? Thanks for having us on. It's awesome what you guys do, Developer DAO and DevNTell. Very excited to show what we're building with Caddi.

Yeah, my pleasure. And thank you so much for making the time to come on the show today and teach us all about the product Caddi. I guess before we get into the nitty-gritty details, perhaps you'd like to give a brief introduction about yourselves for folks who aren't familiar.

For sure. Happy to go first. My name's Jaimin. I've been in crypto since 2021, and it's been a bit of a whirlwind.

You know, I started my career off—it was a bit random—like traditional finance, having studied like aerospace engineering and computer science, and then started to just build some things on the side. First started with trading on centralized exchanges mostly. I was like looking at event-based trading, so like, you know, tweets that might move markets, listings, kind of sniping, and I built some Telegram bots.

And I really started to get fascinated with crypto the deeper I got, like, you know, the on-chain ecosystem seemed like it was thriving. And now it's kind of really flourished into something that looks completely different from when I started. Obviously there's been a lot of ups and downs, and you know, decided to take the plunge on building a startup to address some of the bigger problems I saw in the space in Caddi. Yeah, so a brief background on me, and I'll hand over to Vitor.

Cool. Yeah. I'm Vitor. I've been actually in crypto for a long time. I've been since 2016.

In 2017, I was one of the founders of Pillar Wallet. I ran Pillar as a CTO for some time. And Pillar is a smart wallet, abstraction too, nowadays. And eventually quit crypto and went to work for one of the FAANG companies for a little bit and really missed it. And essentially in the end of last year, I decided to come back to crypto and, yeah, eventually got introduced to Jaimin and joined Caddi. And, yeah, been having fun since then.

Cool, cool. Love to hear that. And I guess just a little bit on like how you guys met, like what was the origin story between you two? How did you both meet and decide to work on Caddi together?

So I guess, yeah, we were introduced—we were looking for someone to handle the backend. So, you know, I am a developer but, you know, I don't have like a huge amount of experience on backend stuff. So we wanted to bring someone into the team that had experience with both crypto and building infrastructure as well.

And I think it was Encode Club. We got put in contact through Encode. And yeah, maybe Vitor will tell you a little bit about that process, but we've been building Caddi for what is it, since March together now?

Yeah, it was for me—it was super funny, I actually—I left my last day at Meta was on a Friday, and on the Monday I talked to Angela from Encode and she said, 'Hey, I have someone to introduce you to.' And so, yeah, so that was— I did not took the break I wanted between companies, but yeah, it's been fun anyway.

Awesome, man. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes it just works out that way. But that's wonderful. You two are collabing now and I can't wait to see what Caddi is all about. So I guess let's get right into it.

For sure. Happy to give you a brief background into Caddi and kind of why we're building what we're building, like some of the problems that we saw. You know, Caddi started from—it was kind of just like I was hacking on some stuff. And I realized that fragmentation was increasing.

So now, you know, Caddi itself is a browser extension. It's—you can think of it like a crypto companion. So it's with you wherever you go. Any dApp you go to, on any chain, it helps you bridge, swap, and you can even uncover insights from the app itself, as we've got an ecosystem of users who are reporting alpha, checking into different dApps, and creating a social layer. So you can uncover insight, stay protected from scams.

But the fragmentation itself—the first product we built was a spot optimizer. So anytime you're trading, and there's a million different trading venues you have. So like if you're trading on Ethereum or any EVM chain, you might use Uniswap, you might be on a DeFi Llama's meta-aggregator, you can even use bridge websites like bridge aggregators like Jumper to trade now as well.

And they all have different pricing. So the first goal was to build something similar to Honey, which is a Web2 app. It helps you get coupon codes when you check out. We realized this kind of flow is really interesting because it's inside when you're about to check out. And the same thing goes for crypto transactions. So anytime you're executing a swap, let's say it's USDC to ETH, there's different prices, and we'd take your trade and we'd optimize them.

But now you have like a million different L1s, L2s, L3s even now. You know, there's lots of different non-EVM chains as well. And it's a bit of a mess. And we see this increasing, you know, there's lots of apps launching their own chain. And moving funds around, like such as if you're trying to go from one chain to another, there's a few different bridges.

And each one supports different assets but also different chains. And we wanted to create a really user-facing tool to enable de-gens, people who are swapping a lot, who are trading, to give them access whenever they needed it. So let's say you're testing out a new social platform and it's on Base. You might need USDC on Base or ETH on Base. You might not have enough on the chain already to use it. So with Caddi, you don't actually have to leave that app. You could then bridge there and then.

So we called it 'Build Your Own—Bring Your Own Bridge,' BYOB. So you can literally inject the bridge. And we'll show you a demo. I think Vitor will take you through that.

And then the second component of it is social. So how do I know what I should do in crypto? Now you can check Twitter. It's super noisy. You know, there's tons of cool developers building really awesome apps. But actually surfacing where real people are using applications, the cool things about them—it's really difficult.

A lot of it works in Telegram groups. There's kind of insiders like who are sharing amongst themselves, or you get told by a friend, 'Hey, have you checked out this app?' But there's no kind of discovery aspect that leverages not necessarily on-chain data, as that's a bit of a commodity at the moment. You know, you can check things like DappRadar, Dune for analytics. There's wallet tracking you can use like Nansen and Arkham.

But we wanted to create a hub and kind of like a home page for what real people who are experimenting with the apps are using, and also what they think of the apps themselves. And, you know, we're starting to see way more apps being built. I think in this bull run, you know, it's there's been a really great focus on consumer applications. And it's honestly hard to stay on top of.

I try to test every app that people say is interesting and hot. But really, like, I want somewhere to kind of understand those experiences, see what people are actually using. And with Caddi, it's right in the flow. So any comment that someone leaves or like a discussion that you want to have on an app, through a browser extension, you can open it up and then you can see, 'Okay, this is what different people are saying about the app. This is how you should use it. This is how you should optimize your experience.'

Or maybe there's something that goes on and it's a hack. We with Caddi can see, 'Hey, look, this has been hacked.' And then you can see from the comments, best not to touch this protocol, as there's a lot of scams, there's a lot of like hacks and it's really quite a messy fragmented ecosystem. And you know, like I think in building this, we are pretty interested in creating this social layer.

So people who—you know, they might be like consumers of crypto, they might not transact every day—they can get the insights that they want. And they can discover the cool things that they can do. And they can also discover different users and their profiles, which are linked to, you know, let's say like Twitter and Farcaster as well. So we're building it around a browser extension. And we've been live for, I think, with the bridging feature, it's been live since May.

And we also have swaps live. We're live on, I think it's like 25 chains at this point. Got a new chain launching soon, I'm sure Vitor, he's been working hard on a lot of the integrations on that side. And yeah, we'll discuss a little bit about like some of the problems that we faced as we've been building it. But there's also a front end for discovery.

And now this is like—I will warn you—very highly experimental. So we tried to create something which was going to like, you know, surface some some emotions and some nostalgia in order for when you discover apps you'll actually be having a good time. Yeah, and that's what we think about crypto. It's a really fun place and there's a million and one things to do. So we want to create a bit of curation around it.

Yeah, I mean, I'll hand over to Vitor now and, you know, I think, you know, if you're happy to explain on like what Caddi is, show the features, it'd be awesome to take a look.

Sure. Just one second just to open the extension. Yep. Can I share my screen? Is that okay?

Yeah, go for it.

I guess while Vitor is bringing up his screen, if you have any questions for the team, please post them in the chat and we will answer them as we go. There you go.

Cool. Yeah. So one of the—Caddi has a very minimal profile in terms of like real estate screen. We don't—if you don't pay attention, Caddi is just this small button on the corner. And this is very intentional. And this is something, you know, just taking the dev perspective, one of the things if you look at dApps right now, you can build this in—you can build all the different chain abstraction tools. You can have in-app wallets.

The fact is, there's one thing that's common for the users that every single user has—every single user has a browser and a browser wallet. If you're on desktop. And the vast majority of the users are. So instead of just trying to provide something that you actually have to do something in your app, we can actually just empower the user to go to any chain he wants easily from your app.

So essentially for every single app, and in this case, for example, could—yeah— Uniswap as an example, we can simply go and, hey, if we realize I need to move chains across chain, I can just come in here and move chains and move funds around different chains. So, yeah— sorry, I'm actually on dev mode, I think. Or not on dev mode?

So the idea for this is you land on Uniswap, but you want to make a swap, but you find that you don't have— yeah, go for it.

Yeah, let's say—yeah, let's say you actually want to buy Brett on Base, and your friends are on Blast. Essentially, this is a way that provides you to aggregate different aggregators. We essentially are a meta-aggregator, so essentially we bring different aggregators into the wallet. You can see to refresh, so it's actually fetching more.

And whatever the app you want to use and whatever chain you have, you have this Swiss army toolkit in your browser that can get there. And we both have a quite high number of chains. I think Jaimin said 25, I actually didn't count the last time. I need to do a DB query to figure out how many. And we actually quite—yeah, we spend and find your balances on almost every single EVM chain.

So you know, we do custom sort algorithm, so you can actually find things more easily. And one very neat feature that it's simple from the technical point of view, but I do find quite— quite nice— is the fact that it actually you can also search for external bridges that we don't support. And we're going to tell you which websites you can go. So you can actually don't have to go and searching around Google and trying to find, 'Hey, how the hell did I bridge to, you know, obscure chain three?'

And essentially—but for integrations within at least EVM space, we have a very massive coverage of the EVM space. And from Monday we'll be on Solana as well, which I'm proud and happy. And, yeah.

There is—yeah, besides the bridging, we also swaps. Same same technique, essentially I'm doing a meta-aggregator of different aggregators, the bridge, Li.Fi, 1inch, 0x, Direct. I'll keep adding more. And, yeah, I guess that's the core of the bridge and swap. Jaimin, do you—did I skip over something?

No, I mean, yeah. This is Caddi in a nutshell. And I think there's over like 250 chains if you think about like a new chain that you might not know where to bridge. We realized that was a massive problem. You probably go to like Jumper and you see, 'Okay, do they support this new chain like TON that people are talking about?' And you might not even know how to get there. And we realized that like, you know, for users, it doesn't really matter that we're routing their transaction through Caddi itself.

It's like, let's give you the tools and show you the right bridges who are trusted bridges. And I think it's like this kind of product thinking that we really try and focus on with Caddi itself to think, 'Okay, like, you know, crypto users, they're not just on one chain anymore.' They're really trying to navigate this mess and it's so fragmented. We have some cool other integrations. You know, like, I guess—yeah—happy to present my screen and show you like some of the other features as well.

But yeah, Vitor's been working hard on, you know, fetching all the balances, making sure that everything works on the backend. I don't know if you want to explain maybe briefly how the backend works? Like I know you integrated different aggregators like Li.Fi, Socket as well. In the end, we are aggregator of aggregators because essentially that's a— because we aggregate both offers if you are searching from them.

We aggregate chain data like your balances and chain data and like price information. So you actually have this convenience of, for example, when you see the chains, we actually sort chains both by your balances and then by market cap, so they have like an order that actually makes sense to you. And and of course we also don't want to build an indexer.

If anyone has built an indexer—building an indexer for—if your game is to be on the largest possible amount of chains, building an indexer is a losing game. I'm going to spend all my time adding more infrastructure to actually be indexing everyone. And you know, we're a small team—myself, Jaimin, and famous Caddi Dev, which is our magic frontend guy.

And so essentially we aggregate a bunch of other sources. We aggregate and cache CoinGecko, aggregate Alchemy for token balances, direct RPC calls for chains where we don't have a service that provides us. So, you know, we do calls ourselves. And now Helius for Solana. And, yeah, five or six aggregators. And we try to do that keeping the latency being acceptable.

So we do weird things like funny loading, like lazy loading some stuff. Like the first time you see the chains, they still don't have the balances because we haven't fetched them yet. And essentially, yeah, the second time you're probably going to have them fetched. Essentially, yeah, it's a Redis cache on top of a microservice application.

Yeah, I'm not sure if you guys can see my screen. But happy to show you like a cool integration that we worked on. So, yeah, I think you mentioned that there was— you know, DexScreener is a trader's website, right? So we can search for a token here. And let's say Brett, for example. We actually see that if we load Caddi here, you know, this tab, it's kind of flashing it.

So we're kind of thinking through, 'Okay, if you're a trader here, what will you want to do?' And if we connect wallet—actually, you know, I think MetaMask is having some issues at the moment. But we'll highlight the right token to buy. My MetaMask isn't connecting to like most websites, even Uniswap. But yeah, it'll highlight the right token to buy. So you can very easily— maybe we can switch this to Keplr wallet or something and see if that works. No, okay.

So I'm not sure it supports Base at the moment Keplr wallet. But yeah, like, let's see if MetaMask works here. You can swap this directly from your flow. So, yeah, apologies that that is not working at the moment. But you can also see this chat as well. So if we go to like Uniswap—you can see that like there's been some comments here.

So these are what people are talking about. So just a couple days ago, someone talking about the hat. Oh, yeah, and this is an interesting feature. So, for example, if I'm on Caddi, you might have seen this little icon. And it gives the Caddi logo a hat. It's 'Steal the Hat' from Baby Innovator. If I click that, I'll take you to another frontend and show you what's actually going on.

So we wanted to gamify actually using crypto. This is where we're storing all of the social information. So you can see here that I've just checked into Uniswap. So I was on the app and I can leave a comment here, like I'd just say GM, GM developers. And this, you know, will get sent through.

And then if we go to Caddi, like we'll see this comment appear on this frontend here. So if I've been using Uniswap, you now have a chat that's dedicated specifically to Uniswap. Now these are check-ins. So you can see this profile here, Insomniac. He's been using different apps. So he's been on Uniswap, Fantasy Top—you know, it's a social-fi game—been on DeBank, Zapper, Paragraph.

And you can see his top comments as well. So here, I've just checked in and then I've said hello to Developer DAO. And then you can actually see like Uniswap's now a hot domain. So this is what real people are using in crypto. Right down. And we can see, 'Okay, so you know, maybe someone else has been on a different website, ETH Warsaw.' So that sounds like it's a conference in Warsaw. You know, they've left some alpha here.

So this guy, you can see who they are, you can see what they're about. We can load their Twitter page. We can say like, 'Okay, he's left some alpha saying I recommend attending this conference.' But this happens on every single app, right? So you could be on DexScreener, you can be on— you know, it's a good way to find out what people are really doing in crypto.

And then you have like the top users that we have here, you have spicy websites. We've seen some like quite off-hand comments, like this user—I mean, I'm not going to read that out for you—but it's getting so much attention. And we're trying to make it fun as well. So we have some memes. So, yeah, like the goal is to really develop this. This is just very much in beta at the moment.

And to help people discover really good things to do in crypto, some of the most exciting apps, and then to start conversations about them. So you can say, 'Oh, I'm really interested in social-fi.' And maybe there's going to be a social-fi way to discover like, you know, what the top testers of those products are doing, the hot alpha, as we know in crypto, being early is pretty much everything.

So if you can discover something cool, then yeah, you can report it really easily, comment on it. And, you know, this works as an interface as well. We can say, 'Oh, GM,' and I can like tag Vitor. GM. Super simple, really fun. And yeah, like, we're pretty excited about where this is going. I think this is, you know, much lacking in the space.

Beyond this, you know, we're developing on new chains, we'll be integrating more bridge aggregators for aggregation, and then really starting to map the whole of crypto from this interface as well. That's a little bit on Caddi. And yeah, do feel free to use it, you know. We are live and very excited about onboarding new users.

Feel free to comment on here. You can just come to this website normie.caddi.fi. You don't need the extension to use it, although I'd highly suggest it for obviously the bridging, swapping, and chat-in-the-flow features. And yeah, like, it's a lot of fun. So feel free to test it out. Feel free to, you know, try and break it if you can. And we'd love to get some feedback.

That's very interesting. So the sites that you can comment on, are those something that you curate on your end to enable, or is it like any website could technically start up a chat?

So it's actually any website. Like, I'm not sure if Developer DAO has like a website. But let's say you're on Developer DAO. Yeah. So you can actually see when the page loads, the Caddi icon will just appear in the corner, right? So it's kind of like peaking. So if I click on this—it's taking a moment to load.

There we go. So now Caddi's wearing the hat and I can say like, 'GM homies.' And yeah, you can you can you can swap on Developer DAO like— okay, so you can connect wallet here. And then you can swap on all these different chains that we've integrated as well. Yeah, I hope that answers your question.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I was just thinking in my head, say for example like— like Amazon has a has some downtime or something, and then people can go on the AWS status page and technically create a chat amongst like all the different developers that are having issues and kind of have like a real-time update of like what's going on, which is kind of an interesting interesting feature and like tangent I guess people can go on with these chats.

I guess have you have you seen— I guess what's the level of engagement like you've seen in terms of just going beyond regular conversations about an application and people kind of like taking on like a hack or something or or something similar?

Yeah, I think one of the key things that we realized, like having a real-time chat which is embedded into every app, is that crypto moves at a million miles an hour. So, you know, I think, I'm happy to share again, like I think it was Multichain that was hacked a while ago. We saw that like— Multichain— I'm not sure about that website.

So multichain.xyz, I think—it was the cross-chain one— multichain.xyz. Someone, I think, you know— we do make sure that users are protected. So this guy, Insomniac, he's a good friend, he said the Multichain bridge no longer works and is no longer being maintained. Do not use the bridge.

So if any users are using Caddi, they'll see this like notification icon if they haven't read the message. So it's really useful for reporting hacks, if they're scams, don't use the website. But for example, you mentioned AWS, if it goes down, let's say like Blast hasn't been producing blocks recently. And I think, you know, as we start to expand the user base, there'll be people who are reporting on this.

And there's potentially like, you know, some incentives, whether it's social that we can include to make sure that there's actually like really helpful information that is embedded exactly where you need it through this chat box in the extension.

Yeah, on personal experience, just after I met Jaimin and I started joining Caddi, I actually installed the extension and wanted to give it a try. And, you know, in between actually formally joining Caddi. And well, I was bored and trying to find something to do, I went to check on TON. And decided to look at DeDust or one of the TON bridges.

And, yeah, there was a helpful integration tip from the other Caddi Dev in the chat. And I was like, 'Oh, thank you, that actually works, and that's actually quite nice.' It's actually built a social layer that we don't have across different applications.

Yeah, definitely. I find this very fascinating. I'm very curious to see how it kind of evolves as more and more people use it. And I guess on that, where— how— well, where can people download the extension and how can they get started?

For sure. You know, we have a Twitter page and that's @caddi_finance. So if you want to follow along for updates, that's where we post most of the most recent Caddi information. Then the website itself is caddi.fi. C-A-D-D-I dot F-I.

And you get an overview of the features and you can download the extension from the Chrome Web Store. It should have a call to action to to get started there. Yeah, so we're primarily based on the extension. If you want to check out the de-gen kind of Windows XP nostalgia vibe, then that's normie.caddi.fi.

I know I'm giving you guys quite a lot of links, but I think the best place to get started is if you go to caddi.fi and then you can download the extension there.

Awesome. Yes. And for people watching, we'll have all those links on the YouTube description, so don't worry about trying to scramble and write them down. Great question from OhKaneda.eth. He says, 'Cool project. Where are the chats stored and for how long?'

It's a really good question. So, you know, we've seen a lot of attempts at like kind of on-chain messaging, wallet-to-wallet chat. And for our application, we realized that like we really don't have to store anything on-chain. So the short answer is it's all in a DynamoDB on AWS.

And it's stored kind of forever. You know, it's kind of like— it's very much a work in progress at the moment. So, you know, the ability to like tie in your Twitter profile, your Farcaster, that all works. And yeah, it would just exist on that domain kind of forever until, you know, like we have like a remove post or something if you want to remove your profile.

But yeah, like, it's not using any crypto and we don't think we need to at this point. So yeah, like, it's all AWS.

And— I have previous experience in messaging, back at Pillar we built a full-blown Signal derivative to to work as a wallet-to-wallet messaging. That was very slow in terms of like development time and the amount of effort it took. Right now, the most important is to to actually get, you know, actionable feedback and understand how people actually use this.

It's understanding the human problem. For the future, yeah, we can— there's a number of solutions that can be explored.

Awesome, awesome. Thank you for letting us know and great question OhKaneda. Good stuff, man. Yeah, unfortunately, we're pretty much at time here. I guess the last question from me is— you mentioned I think earlier— but just to reiterate, what's the best place to follow for updates for all things Caddi and to get in touch with you if people have feature requests or have any issues to report? What's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, so if you want to follow along for project updates, the best is our Twitter, @caddi_finance on Twitter. And yeah, feel free to reach out.

If you download the extension, like one of the buttons is to join our community chat. So we've got a Telegram and feel free to hop in, ask for any features, we're pretty responsive. We we love building new things for users, we're always constantly brainstorming, 'Okay, like what other cool things can we build here?' And if you do have some more feedback, then feel free to just leave it on the 'if you know you know' chat as well.

You can just tweet to us from the extension, which would be pretty fun as well.

Excellent. Awesome. Yeah, this was very interesting. Thank you so much to both of you for coming on and giving us a demo of that. That is— like I mentioned, I'm very interested to see how this social paradigm kind of evolves as more and more people use it. But, yeah, I mean, it was wonderful having you both on DevNTell and hope you guys come back on sometime down the line as well when you've got more features to show off.

Thanks so much for having us Narb. Yeah, really love this format DevNTell and great chance to connect with some some awesome developers.

Yeah, my pleasure, my pleasure. Anytime. And yeah, folks, thank you again for joining us on your Friday morning or Saturday or wherever you are in the world. Hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, happy weekend, and we will catch you all back here for another great episode of DevNTell. Until then, cheers. See ya.